RTF/ODF Scan for Zotero

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  • Thanks for the reminder. To be honest, I had forgotten.
  • Hi adamsmith I have sent you the files ordered 1 to 4 being 1 original export (compile) Scrivener to RTF because as kithairon says the scrivener - rtf is more stable than Scrivener -odt. Then no. 2 original rtf saved as odt, no. 3 after scan and no. 4 after setting document preferences. I have found like kithairon that going RTF then odt results in a cleaner document, also it means styles can be established straight away so any messes in LO can be cleaned up easier. Unlike kithairon I get the uneven fonts issue no matter what I do.

    At the moment my work flow is to bring it back to Word again at the very end - this kills the live Zotero fields but allows me to clean up the jumbled footnote fonts. It's just a shame to have to mess around as much as this just to send a chapter to my supervisor ...

    Thanks for you help always.
  • The problem that I reported above and that kithairon has also posted on seems to arise from forgetting how Zotero likes to work! My mistake was to be inserting the text citation markers (ex Scannable Cite) into scrivener footnotes (either linked or inline). It compiles OK though as others have remarked, sans styles. The Zotero RTF/ODF Scan runs accurately and produces correct live citations in the .odt file, but garbles fonts as per my and kithairon's observations.
    I just edited a section of my work converting (in Scrivener) the citation text markers from inline footnotes to body text. This is only a matter of a couple of keystrokes, but does require a bit of basic editing eg. when the footnote had not only the citation but also some comment, although the citation marker can hold prefix and suffix text. Also material that you want in a footnote other than citations can still be left as Scrivener footnotes.
    On compile, the result is perfect - ie I had forgotten the basic fact that Zotero creates footnotes for you when you use a footnote style like Chicago 16 full note. Result - all live citations set up in numbered footnotes with 'Footer' style (using Libre Office). The non-citation footnotes that were compiled out of scrivener (eg the occasional cross reference or explanatory comment) are correctly numbered in the eventual LO document but don't have the Footer style. In my case there aren't so many of these and it is easy to apply the style manually, especially if you display them as endnotes.
    I'm playing with his some more but have to admit it looks like it was neither a Scrivener problem nor a Zotero problem but a user problem ... I have also posted this comment over at the scrivener forum but somewhat embarrassed to have overlooked the obvious and thanks to adamsmith and fbennett for all your help.
  • Thanks for this (relatively) happy news.

    After my last post above, I prepared a version of RTF/ODF Scan that scrubs all Scrivener-supplied formatting information from the file on conversion. After testing it, kithairon reports that, although this avoids the footnote font irregularities, the general loss of formatting is not worth the candle.

    It would be nice to get in-footnote citations to work more smoothly, but comparing the pre- and post-processing samples we've received, it seems that would be difficult to achieve. The cite objects we insert into the file seem to interact with the surrounding style context. A reference inserted at the beginning of a note carries a different style from one inserted after a run of text, although their appearance is the same. I don't see any practical way of inferring the style logic from the bare XML, so I think this is probably as good as it gets.
  • @epedrick - we were actually aware of that, but for long footnotes it is, of course, nice to be able to place a citation into a footnote and working with the LibreOffice plugin directly that works without issues, so I wouldn't call this a user error. But as Frank says, we just can't make that work with the scan.
  • Hi,
    I am using Scrivener / OpenOffice / Zotero RTF/ODF Scan / MacOs
    I was having some problems with the parenthesis, prefix, page number and postfix showing up after I converted to citations and back to OpenOffice. The references were generated ok.
    After a bit of experimentation, i found that refreshing the document in OpenOffice using the Zotero toolbar refresh button after I opened the converted doc did the trick!!!
    Works a charm now,
    thanks so much.
    -don
  • Hi,

    Apologies if there's an answer to this up somewhere but it's not that easy to search this thread and it's a bit urgent. I'm getting the message 'there was an error processing this file' when I try an ODT scan on one specific file. Other files work great. I have a big hand-in for my thesis this week and I really don't want to go back through this chapter and do it all manually... help please!
  • If you could narrow this down some that would help. I.e. split the file in two, see which of the two halves fails the scan, then continue with that until you have a fairly minimal document.
    You can send that to my e-mail which is at the bottom of this blogpost:
    https://www.zotero.org/blog/summer-zotero-workshops/
  • The quickest way to find the cause will be to make a copy of the ODT, then divide it into two halves, check which one fails, and divide that again. Rinse and repeat until you have the problem pinpointed, then go back and make the repair in the original doc.
  • the issue reported by Rubens794 is fixed in a new release available now.
  • Many thanks to adamsmith for swift and effective response
  • edited April 26, 2014
    Hello,

    is it possible to add comments to a scannable cite? E.g. something like:

    { ....... as before ...... | comment }

    Basically, we'd like to put a http link to the zotero item online into the "comment", which is handy. Or could this just be added after the author/title, as this will be replaced in the scan anyway?

    (Already using hidden prefs to show full title for human readable reference, and zotero:// style links.)

    Thanks!
    Bjoern
  • Or could this just be added after the author/title, as this will be replaced in the scan anyway?
    this would seem like the best option, yes.

    If you know some - very, very basic - javascript, it'd also be trivial to automate that in the Scannable Cite translator, especially since the code is already in the item URI translator that I assume you're using to get the online Zotero link.

    (As a note - the comment will show up in the citation when you first open the document in LibreOffice. It will disappear once you set a citation style).
  • edited April 26, 2014
    Thanks Adam!

    Yes, I've created a mashup of the uri translator, combined with scannable cite! It's pretty close to what I'd like. Except see post about html/rtf snippet (also on zotero-dev). Would be really neat to have that!

    Thanks!
    Bjoern
  • (make sure to save the custom version of the translator somewhere outside Zotero - it'll be overwritten every time we update the add-on).
  • Thanks for the tip!
    Bjoern
  • Thanks for making this great extension, which has made it possible for me to switch to Zotero while using Scrivener. I think I've found a bug, which is that if I use asterisks to indicate italics more than once in a citation (for instance, because I'm citing multiple newspapers, which I do by hand rather than with Zotero), only the first pair is recognized and converted to italics. After that, they just stay as asterisks. This isn't a huge issue, because I can just find them later, but it would be nice to save that step.

    An unrelated issue (although it could be a workaround for the first issue): would it be possible to add the ability to have a blank citation? I know I'm supposed to do everything as a Zotero citation, but since I use a lot of archival sources that aren't handled very well by Zotero, I prefer to just write those by hand and just use Zotero for published sources. Mixing and matching, though, means that ibid. is unreliable. If I could insert an invisible citation, then I wouldn't have to worry about double checking my ibids.

    Thanks!
  • Hi all,

    I have run into an odd problem with ODF scan on a document containing some figures. The document was orignally created in Scrivener, and has three embedded figures I incorporated from clipboard copying from a powerpoint presentation. A few days ago I tested the file exported from Scrivener to odt, then scanned with zotero RFT/ODF scan to produce the myfile_(citations).odt version, and it seemed to be fine. Then yesterday attempting the same process on a later version I found that after the RFT/ODT scan the output file would not open in OpenOffice, which reported that there was a problem with the xml format for a subdocument at some location x,y - totally baffling. After a long while I discovered that if I delete the second of the three images in the odt file exported from Scivener the RFT/ODT scan works fine. There is no difference as far as I can tell with the way figures 1 and 3 were incorporated into the document, but these cause no problems. Note also that all three figures were in the original succesfully scanned version from a few days back - in the meantime I have added a little more text, and additional citations. It is likely that I have resized the figures or something like this in the last day or so, but otherwise I don't think I have worked on the document around where the figures are embedded.

    Does anyone know what is going on or has had the same issue?

    regards

    Ian
  • edited September 13, 2014
    There was an update to the RTF/ODF Scan plugin last week. If you (or your computer) updated the plugin recently, the update may be the cause of the trouble.

    In any case, the plugin should never produce invalid XML. If you still have a copy of the broken document, and the content is not confidential, we can take a look and figure out why it's mis-stepping. I'll send you a Zotero message privately with details.
  • I believe I do still have the broken file and am happy to send it to you, My firefox is on auto upgrade so it is likely to be the latest version of the plugin I guess.
  • (A tardy followup to note that the bug behind the problem reported by @lakelander above has been fixed in the latest update to the ODF/RTF Scan plugin.)
  • On the website it says: "You can now insert citation markers by either draging&dropping items or by using ctrl+alt+c (cmd+shift+c on Mac) to copy them to your clipboard ... "

    I'm using Windows 8.1, and have to ctrl+SHIFT+c in order to copy citations, not alt.

    Hope this saves some time for some people.
  • Thanks, that changed in Zotero a while ago, we'll fix it in the instructions.
  • Hi,
    I am using this plugin to my zotero standalone and I found very useful. it is a quick and smart (use plain cite and at then convert to the final doc) way to write a doc and share between collegaues which use different OS/Writer.
    Now quick question. When cI ite as following:

    test{ | Theobald, & Wuttke, 2008 | | |zu:0:QTF4GQ6M}{ | Access, 2012 | | |zu:0:8RDNN4PM}{ | Guimara, & Mathiowetz, 2009 | | |zu:0:ENPWUF7F}{ | Bortolato, et al., 2013 | | |zu:2063417:68VJD8EI}

    and convert to the final doc I get

    test ^1,2-4 and not test^1-4

    any help?

    thanks
  • How does it look when you convert to an author-date citation style like APA (for testing, I understand that's not what you want)?
  • Hi,
    I tried a new document and it worked as a charme:

    test ^1-4

    probably some error in the previous doc
  • A bookmarklet is now available that can be used on zotero.org to produce Scannable Cites. See Inserting Citations > From zotero.org here
  • Hmmmm. Couple of Questions.

    (1) Do we have a code for suppressing trailing punctuation in RTF/ODF Scan?
    (2) Is it possible to suppress for one or all sources (in a multi-source cite) instead of only the final source?

    Thx,

    M
  • ODF scan doesn't support anything Zotero's LibreOffice add-on doesn't support.
  • @mbruffey: If this is for use with MLZ, we could work out some sort of syntax to trigger suppression of final punctuation when converting cites. It might be simpler for drafting (though less elegant in some ways), to just suppress in the document as a whole, and include the trailing punctuation everywhere.

    There isn't a way of quashing inter-cite joining punctuation in multiple citations, and I can't think of a case where that would be useful. Where would you need it?
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