No style formatting for citation copy and bibliography copy

fumoseaffabulazioni
Dear Zotero team,

When I copy and paste citations and bibliographies from the Zotero app, I see that text formatting comes with it. I understand the formatting regarding the Italics, but bringing in also text size or font family brings me to paste without style, which means also losing italics. Is there a way to export citations and bibliographies with no text formatting with the exclusion of italics and URL links?

Thanks,
Dario
  • dstillman
    Zotero doesn't include text size or font family in any output.

    You can see the actual HTML that's put on the clipboard if you turn on "Copy as HTML" in the Quick Copy settings and copy into a plain-text editor (Notepad, TextEdit).
  • fumoseaffabulazioni
    Hi Dan,

    I did what you said and the text is not entirely plain. If it’s true that there is no font family or size, the div tag comes with line-height, margins, and indent. I usually find this annoying because I always have my own formatting. In my humble opinion, the export should be a series of div tags with no formatting or classes. Of course, this is my humble, personal opinion.

    Dario


    Candia, Cristian, C. Jara-Figueroa, Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert, Albert-László Barabási, and César A. Hidalgo. 2019. “The Universal Decay of Collective Memory and Attention.” Nature Human Behaviour 3 (1): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0474-5.


  • adamsmith
    Citation styles generally specify line spacing and the presence/absence of indents, and numbers in margins, though, so those need to be part of copy & paste.
    What tool are you pasting into? In MS Office tools, I think paste with merge formatting would do what you want
  • fumoseaffabulazioni
    Hi Adam,

    I understand what you say, but I am not sure that using a specific citation style implies the use of its paper formatting. I usually employ Chicago (author-date), but I've never noticed that there are also guidelines for paper formatting. I am quite sure a lot of journals have their own paper formatting.

    I work a lot with Google Docs. For each paper I write, I create a Zotero folder to copy and paste the entire bibliography, but, of course, each time I paste, as I have my paper formatting, I have either to paste without italics or to remove indentation.
  • adamsmith
    The formatting guidelines (e.g. hanging indent and spacing between entries) are specifically for the bibliography, not just the paper as a whole. It's obviously fine if you decide to ignore those, but that's an arbitrary call on your end and I don't see why Zotero should make that same arbitrary call
  • fumoseaffabulazioni
    I utterly understand your point of view. I just say that, as a graphic designer, I don't share this part of citation guidelines.

    I think you have chosen the best solution, and my love for Zotero is persisting!

    Thanks for clarifying this,
    Dario
  • adamsmith
    (FWIW I think the real problem is the lack of a merge formatting during paste option in Google docs. As I say above, this is a non-issue in MS Word and other MS Office Apps)
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