Issue number biblatex export problem

gsagostinho
I am having a problem with the biblatex export. I have a journal article whose issue number is 5+6. When I click on 'Create Bibliography from Item...', Zotero copies the correct citation to my clipboard. But when I click on 'Export Item...' and select biblatex, the resulting field is number = {5}. I tried using '5 and 6', '5-6', '5--6', but all to no avail. Funnily enough, if the issue number starts with a non-digit character, it is exported as 'issue' instead of 'number' into biblatex syntax, and then it does display all characters. So for instance, if I have the issue set as 'a5+6' in Zotero, the biblatex export gives me issue = {a5+6}.

Is there a way to export this correctly? I don't like to do manual modifications to my .bib files since I am always overwritting it when I add new sources to my thesis.

Many thanks!
  • gsagostinho
    Just in case anyone else runs into this problem in the future, I wrote a little Python script to automatically correct this error, so all I need to do is run it once in the same directory as my bibliography.py every time I export and overwrite it via Zotero. This script can be extended and the original_string and replacement_strings can take lists of modifications, thus making several modifications at once. Here is the code: https://pastebin.com/YrJHJ7SH
  • emilianoeheyns
    BBT exports this to the issue field as "5+6"
  • gsagostinho
    Interesting, the BibTeX option does indeed exports it correctly while the BibLaTeX option doesn't. Do you know what other differences there might be between these two exporters?
  • emilianoeheyns
    I think the standard BibTeX exporter doesn't try to detect whether it's a number, but I meant the BBT BibLaTeX exporter.
  • gsagostinho
    Fantastic, that looks really good. Many thanks!
  • emilianoeheyns
    But I'll try to see if I can fix the standard BibLaTeX exporter. I've found the source of the problem but I haven't been able to load the fixed translator yet.
  • gsagostinho
    That's great, many thanks Emiliano. I also just came across your package for Atom which makes use of the BBT exporter, that sounds really handy as I do all my LaTeX work on Atom. I greatly appreciate it!
  • emilianoeheyns
    That package hasn't seen maintenance in a long time -- I'm not sure whether everything still works.
  • gsagostinho
    I will test it later and report back if something is broken, possibly in a new discussion (apologies for going off-topic). Thanks again.
  • gsagostinho
    Emiliano, the Atom package works great. The only thing I would add to is to add one more Citation Style which would output the plain bibliography tag. This would make life easier for people like me using \parencite and \cite instead of using natlib's own format. At the moment I set it to pandoc but I must manually remove the @ symbol from every citation. Otherwise this is really great, will make my workflow with Atom so much smoother!
  • emilianoeheyns
    5.1.1 allows you to pick your own LaTeX command. Or do you mean just the citekey when you say "plain bibliography tag"?
  • gsagostinho
    I meant exactly that, thanks a lot for the new release. This package and the BBT BibLaTeX plugin will both substantially speed up my work!
  • gsagostinho
    Emiliano, I found another small bug with the BBT plugin. When the first word in the title field is in lower case letters, BBT capitalizes it during the exportation. However, if any letter other than the first one is capitalized, BBT keeps the same capitalization as in Zotero. Here are two concrete examples to illustrate this: I have written two computer packages that I want to add to the references of my dissertation. One is called 'auxjad' with lower case letters (and which BBT wrongly exports as 'Auxjad'), and the other is called 'lilypondLibrary' (which BBT exports correctly due to the capitalized 'L' letter in the middle of the word). I would suggest that the exported bib file should always keep the same capitalization of all fields as the user input in Zotero; this minimizes the chance of cryptic issues such as this and leaves it up to the user to ensure that his database is clean and consistent. Would you consider updating the plugin to fix this?
  • emilianoeheyns
    Can you open an issue for this on github?
  • gsagostinho
    Done, see https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/1144

    Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it.
  • emilianoeheyns
    This was in the end handled with nocase sections.
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