Formatting Problems with Zotero/Scrivener Integration

ProbisPateo
Hello, all!

Sorry if this is in the wrong section: I am new to Zotero and thus this forum as well.

I love Scrivener, and have had Zotero highly recommended to me by my thesis supervisor, but I have been having some troubles making it work for me. I have everything basically "working" - I know how to paste Zotero entries into Scrivener footnotes, save my Scrivener project as an .odt file, have it run through the Zotero Standalone RTF/ODF scan plugin and put back out as an .odt file, and open it with OpenOffice to see my newly-created document with coherent citations (I also have the Zotero OpenOffice Integration plugin) - but whenever I do this, I run into a problem. When I open my new document, my two test citations have an appropriate superscripted number to indicate a footnote, but are followed on the next page (problem one: not the end of the first page) by corresponding superscripted numbers and the author surname, comma and year (second problem: not the right information or format). When I go to the plugin toolbar and click Set Document Preferences, it is already on Chicago Style (full note), which should be the correct style. When I select it again and click "OK," it formats the information correctly according to Chicago style, except that a) the citations are on the second page, not the end of the page (they are footnotes), b) the corresponding entry numbers are superscripted (they should be normal, indented and followed with a period), and c) most importantly, it has actually footnoted the superscripted numbers and not the actual text that requires a footnote.

The only workaround I have found is pasting the Zotero entry right into my editor in Scrivener, which works fine - the problem with this being that I can barely read my text through all of the encoded gobbledygook in my editor, and that my word/page count is now useless. Using comments created extra square brackets, using inline annotations didn't work, and so on, and using LibreOffice or Word instead of OpenOffice didn't work, either.

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
  • aurimas
    edited July 26, 2014
    When I select it again and click "OK," it formats the information correctly according to Chicago style, except that a) the citations are on the second page, not the end of the page (they are footnotes), b) the corresponding entry numbers are superscripted (they should be normal, indented and followed with a period), and c) most importantly, it has actually footnoted the superscripted numbers and not the actual text that requires a footnote.
    Could you post a screenshot of this? (just to make sure we're not misunderstanding you)

    Edit: you can upload it somewhere (e.g. Dropbox or imgur.com) and paste a link here.
  • ProbisPateo
    Of course! Does this work?

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/rnch8hmln5zl3fi/Individuals.jpg
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/r1ooa2mvz3n77it/Zoomed Out.jpg

    I've showed each individual part of what happens in the first photo, and a zoomed out photo to show how it looks altogether.
  • fbennett
    Try setting Zotero to use a numeric or in-text style (like Vancouver or CMS author-date) for the first refresh following conversion, then switching to the footnote style after.
  • ProbisPateo
    Thanks, but no luck. Both times, converting to CMS full note the second time resulted in "footnoting the footnote." :(
  • jsmith967
    I realize that this thread is old but I believe I have found a solution to your problem. It is complicated and I am sure that there is a more stream-lined solution. However, I have not been able to find one so this is what I am doing right now! I have similar requirements as ProbisPateo. My requirements and goals for Scrivener and Zotero integration are:

    1. Compose with Scrivener.
    2. Use Zotero to manage dynamic footnotes. (Use Scannable Cite in Scrivener)
    3. Export Scrivener to document in order to use dynamic, Zotero footnotes. The only way to do this is in .odt. The notes must be properly formatted at the bottom of the page for Chicago/Turabian style.
    4. Export a correctly formatted .odt to .docx (albeit, without Zotero footnotes; I would love to find out how to get Zotero footnotes in Word/.docx using Scrivener, but it does not seem possible at this point.)

    Link to video "Scrivener with Zotero Integration (Footnote Formatting)": http://youtu.be/xoHNURdFCQs

    Hope this is a help to researchers out there!
  • fbennett
    edited February 11, 2015
    @jsmith967: Have you tried exporting from Scrivener in Rich Text Format (RTF), opening the RTF file in LibreOffice, and saving it in ODT? We've been told that is more reliable than direct export of ODT from Scrivener.

    (For migration of live references in documents between LibreOffice to Word, I believe it's possible, but a little awkward to manage.)
  • jsmith967
    That does in fact work! Great suggestion. That end result is the same. The advantage of your suggestion is that since it begins in .rtf, LibreOffice seems to like that format much more, since formatting the footnotes was even easier. I did not have to do the work as required when exporting to .docx. I had to change a few things but I do like this method better. I will post a video to demonstrate for those who need it!
  • jsmith967
    Here is a video describing fbennett's method that compiles into .rtf first.

    Link: http://youtu.be/s-m_1BKdNxE
  • jsmith967
    @fbennett: How do you preserve live references between Word and Libre? I thought the only way was through bookmarks, which cannot be in footnotes. I have tried to preserve them with no luck. Any suggestions will be helpful!
  • adamsmith
    You can try switching to an author-date style, then use bookmarks, transfer to Word, and switch to a footnote-based style. That should work, I believe.
  • jsmith967
    @adamsmith. Thank you for your reply. Please correct me if I am wrong, I do not believe that this suggestion will work. Given my document has footnotes with the bib. information, Zotero cannot "pull" those footnotes into parentheticals in order to meet the requirement of bookmarks. Namely, that the bookmarks must not be located in footnotes/endnotes. Therefore, when I convert the Zotero footnotes to something else, say author-date, it does indeed change the formatting but it remains in the footnote. When I then switch it from Reference marks to Bookmarks, it removes the Zotero fielding in the footnote. Here are my steps that I perform:

    1. Export Scrivener to .rtf
    2. Open .rtf in Libre and save as .odt
    3. Run RTF/ODF scan on .odt document
    4. Open .odt document in Libre
    5. Convert Zotero references in to author-date and change to Bookmarks
    6. Save .odt in Libre
    7. Open .odt in Word and discover that the Zotero fields have been removed.
    6'. Alternatively, if I save the .odt document in Libre as a .docx and then open the .docx in Word, I find that I cannot modify the style. Word will not let the Zotero menu come up.

    If I am doing something wrong, please let me know. Thanks in advance for the help.
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