Citations Getting Delinked

jeichen
I happily use Firefox+Zotero+Libre Writer plugin. The problem I have is that sharing documents with other people, as often as not, when then come back the citations have been delinked. I was wondering if there is a macro or some other way to have properly formated citations in the text automatically get converation to zotero citations.

I've also never asked about Zotero, so I'm not sure if I'm phrasing it correctly or if there is other information I should provide.

Thank you.
  • aurimas
    Yeah, it's a known issue that we haven't figured out how to solve yet. You can use placeholders from the RTF/ODF Scan add-on to keep plain text references in text that can be unambiguously recognized by Zotero later. They don't look pretty though.

    Other than that, any idea how the references got delinked? Was the document saved in some odd format at some point? Was it opened in some software other than Word or Libre/OpenOffice? Are we talking about all references or only a subset?
  • jeichen
    Thank you for your prompt response.

    Unfortunately, I haven't be able to reproduce it consistantly. It seems like sometimes, the all get delinked and other times only some. It also seems like something I can cut and paste citation with the link being preserved and other times it doesn't. I will try and keep an closer eye out to reproduce when it happens.

    That looks like an interesting solution but as I collaborate with people using various versions of MS Word, I've found it easier to work with doc(x) files. I'm not sure if it's related sometimes I've discovered that some times Libre Writers save doc(x) files in a format that it can read find, but to various versions of Word is corrupt.

    I don't really have time to research the various libraries and document structures but I would be very happy with just a (python) script I could run for the commandline.
  • fbennett
    edited July 28, 2014
    With LibreOffice Writer, the RTF/ODF Scan plugin can convert citations to the scannable text form, as well as from the scannable text to live Zotero citations.

    If you convert the citations to scannable text before sharing the document with others, your cites should be safer. You can reconvert to Zotero live cites when the document comes back to you.
  • jeichen
    That is true (and the plugin seems to work ok).

    But I started using Zotero to reduce steps in my workflow, not add to it. It also makes it a harder to sell to my colleagues.

    And I think the delinking bug, has something to do with Document Preferences as it just happened to me again.
  • aurimas
    Yes, we understand that this is not a convenient workflow and we would like to fix the issue (if that's technically possible).

    For posterity, could you indicate here what options you have selected in Document Preferences? Also, which document format are you saving to (doc or docx? or does the issue happen with both)? Which version of LibreOffice do you use? Also, it would be very helpful if you could figure out at least one scenario where the references are de-linked. (e.g. saving to doc format, then opening in Word 2013 and saving as docx and opening that document again in LibreOffice). This _may_ be a LibreOffice bug, or a Word bug, or it could be a bug in Zotero.

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