Make "Unlink Citations" create a new copy of the current file

maier.de
"Unlink Citations" works now on the currently open document. Doing so is irreversible. Would it be an option to leave the original document untouched and to create a new copy without fields instead?
  • bwiernik
    edited March 4, 2019
    I can see the benefit, but you can of course use the Save As/Save a Copy option to save the unlinked version as a new file.
  • adamsmith
    I don't know if this is possible, but since we always tell people to only use the button on a copy of a paper, this makes sense to me conceptually (I'm guessing maier.de knows how to do this but is thinking about less experience users)
  • maier.de
    Exactly, the idea was that this could help minimizing the risk of accidental unlinking. I think I've seen some threads on the forums where this was the problem.

    (By the way, this is also how unlinking works in some other reference managers, at least in citavi.)
  • maier.de
    Just out of curiosity: What is the usual procedure for dealing with such requests? bwiernik and adamsmith have both stated that the idea could be useful, but what are the next steps now? Will there be a internal discussion among the devs? Will a decision about this be posted in due time?
  • adomasven
    The developers are reading the forums. This is likely technically feasible for both LibreOffice and Word and perhaps Google Docs too, but given that any changes to integration plugins are fairly costly in terms of development time and complexity we don't make them unless there is a very convincing case or very high user interest.
  • rohanshad
    Could just have a warning pop up that asks 'are you sure' before the unlink is executed?
  • dstillman
    @rohanshad: There's already a confirmation dialog.
  • djross3
    (One concern: Word nearly freezes whenever I save my hundreds-of-pages dissertation file, and then the application goes into beachball mode (OSX) while everything processes for a few minutes. I'd be very concerned about Zotero automatically controlling anything that might be so slow in the first place in Word. Saving a new copy of a document may not be trivial. Automatically renaming the file doesn't seem like the best idea, but also creating a whole new copy of the document seems messy, especially if anything like copy-paste is involved, for large documents.)

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