Style editor inconsistent with Libreoffice ouput

mattis · March 19, 2020

For more than 10 citations, for a numbering citation style, e.g IEEE, the style editor does not show the same bibliography as Libreoffice. Numbered items are right-aligned in the style editor, but left aligned in Libreoffice (have not tested MS word). The IEEE scientific journal requires the items to be right-aligned which is what I want to achieve. I have experimented with, among other things, second-field-align="margin" or "flush". However, this does not seem possible to me. Does anyone have a solution for this? Possible suggestion for an zotero update?

adamsmith · March 20, 2020

Have you tried just moving the indent for the bibliography in Libre Office? I think if it's too narrow, two- or three-digit numbers can overlap with it an cause issues.

(But I also don't understand exactly what you need. You don't seem to be using "right-aligned" in the way it's commonly used, i.e. flush to the right, because no journal I've ever seen asks for that and certainly IEEE doesn't, so if the above doesn't help, maybe take a couple of screenshots, put them on a free image hosting site and link to them here).

mattis · March 20, 2020

Thanks for the reply. I did not explain properly. I've posted three screenshots here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/M5dgcaQY49v1b7iAA

There is a screenshot from an article which has the layout I want: "Screenshot IEEE article.png". Using the IEEE style, the style manager shows a promising layout: "Screenshot Zotero style editor.png". Note how the numbers are positioned in the exact same way horizontally. However, when using LibrOffice, see "Screenshot LibreOffice bibliography.png", the numbers from [1]-[9] in the bibliography are not aligned with the second digit from [10] -[13]. It's strange that the style editor ("Screenshot Zotero style editor.png") have this layout and not in Libreoffice ("Screenshot LibreOffice bibliography.png"). Such things are a big deal for scientific journals. Any ideas?

adamsmith · March 20, 2020

Oh I see -- I don't think Zotero can do that -- I'm not even sure to what degree that's possible in LibreOffice, so I wouldn't expect this to make a Zotero update. Are you sure journals care about this? We've had many thousands of users using IEEE for article submissions and this has literally never come up. (The style editor uses html while LibreOffice uses RTF to render text, so there can be slight differences in formatting)

bwiernik · March 20, 2020

I have submitted to IEEE several times—this isn’t something they care about in my experience.

mattis · March 20, 2020

Thank you. It's my co-writers I need to persuade. They don't like LibreOffice and therefore I need it exactly the same as the documentation from IEEE. It seems strange to me that it is not possible to insert some white space/ghost char in Zotero before the number to prevent this. Then again I'm not a developer, so I don't know.
I will change the Bibliography manually, but I was hoping this was possible without. Annoying when things are aaalmost 100% perfect. I truly believe more researchers would consider Zotero if details like this where updated.