LibreOffice integration: make reference tooltip human-readable

anark · June 6, 2015

I mostly use author-date citation formats and often find myself mousing over an author-date reference in the running text of my word processing program to remind myself what the referenced work is. The tooltip that appears for a short while contains a lot of internal Zotero code -- brackets, slashes, database field IDs -- that doesn't make any sense to a human reader. I still often find myself squinting at such tooltips because somewhere within the code I often manage to find the 'title' field, saving me a trip to the list of works cited to find the work title.

This is a frustrating experience, however, and it's heightened by the fact that the tooltip remains visible for only a short while, so I'm not only trying to glean information from hard-to-read code, I also need to do it within a short time.

Wouldn't it be possible to render those tooltips in the citation style used, showing only the actual bibliographical data rather than all that irrelevant code?

Thanks!

LibreOffice 4.2.8.2, Ubuntu 14.04

adamsmith · June 6, 2015

no--the tooltip is generated by LibreOffice and that, in turn, displays the field code Zotero uses to generate the citations. There's a button in the add-on to open the Zotero item, if that helps? Or you could author in footnote mode and just switch to author-date.

fbennett · June 7, 2015

It would indeed be nice to display the field code data in a more readable format. It might be possible with a LibreOffice extension, but there isn't anything we can do on Zotero-side.

You can extend the time that tooltips are displayed, though. Visit Tools -> Options -> Accessibility (under the Writer heading), and you'll see a widget in that pane for setting the time-to-display for help tips.

anark · June 7, 2015

Thanks!

adamsmith · June 7, 2015

the other thing that might be possible -- ZoteroQuickLook has a function that's currently Mac only that allows you to show the PDF (or other displayable attachments) by pressing cmd+y with the cursor in a Zotero citation field.
I don't have any sense on how easily that could be added for Linux and/or Windows.

anark · June 8, 2015

Thanks! I followed Frank's suggestion of extending the time that tooltips are displayed. I can now pick the title field from the tangle without the stress of needing to do it in four seconds. This is less than ideal, but it's good enough: I can keep focused on the work and no longer need to break my stride to engage in an unnerving, silly task.