Backward parentheses in in-text Chicago (author-date) citations, RTL language (Hebrew), Word 2016

id_ot · May 22, 2018

Hi everyone,

New to Zotero. Have tried to find a solution to this issue in the forums but without luck. I'm working on a text in Hebrew where most of my bibliography titles are also in Hebrew. When I use the Zotero word plugin to add an in-text author-date citation, the parentheses on both sides are reversed, i.e. " )author, date, page( " instead of " (author, date, page) " .
I've seen this issue come up a few times in the forums, but I haven't encountered any definitive solution so far. Does anyone have an idea? Language in Zotero is set to "heb" for all of these items.
Thanks!

bwiernik · May 22, 2018

Set the language field to "he", rather than "heb". Does that fix the issue?

DWL-SDCA · May 22, 2018

I seem to remember that using the 2-character "he" form instead ofthe 3-character format fixed this. A true expert may reply by stating that I'm wrong. I recommend changing one of your Zotero library records as a test. I'm almost sure that this 2-character format fixed reversed parens for me with a farsi title.

id_ot · May 22, 2018

Thanks for the replies, I've tried as you both suggest, but unfortunately, that didn't do it.
In the meanwhile I've noticed that this issue only happens in in-text author-date citations - there is no such problem when opting for a full-note (footnote) citation style in the document preferences.

bwiernik · May 22, 2018

Can you save a Word document with a minimal example to Dropbox or similar and link here?

id_ot · May 23, 2018

Sure, thanks, here -

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k_rkAWrDH1RtiEPyhVwXSewnBmH9CpP6

you'll notice that the problem only happens when adding the citation on Hebrew RTL text, but is fine when added to text in English.

perryg · August 9, 2019

Has anyone found a solution to the problem of citations in Hebrew (RTL). The parentheses are opposite , instead of (.....) they are ).....(

maier.de · August 9, 2019

I don't think there is a solution yet. RTL handling indeed needs some improvements. See also this issue: https://github.com/Juris-M/zotero/issues/59 (this is for Juris-M, which could be interesting for you anyway.) Anyway, I hope I'll be able to look into this soon...

By the way, have you tried LibreOffice? @fbennett has written in the issue above that RTL works much better there.

perryg · August 9, 2019

I must stick with Office Word so that LibreOffice is unfortunately not an option for me. I honestly hope that you will come up with a solution soon as it is only in the Citation part. The Reference list is perfect, both LTR and RTL.
I have found a work around that is a bit tedious but helps in the meantime. I include the citation form RTL and get )2004, name, name( . When the document is finally finished, I go back and find all these citations, and manually type in the info in the brackets so that I get the following: )2004, name, name( (2004, name, name). I then mark the original citation and change the font size to 1 and color to white. I am then left with (2004, name, name)