Disable importer translator fields

dcrucio
When I import articles a bunch of fields get automatically populated according to the different translators that get used.
This is very useful, however very often some fields I don't need are populated as well, or even worse fields that I wish to manually edit.
For example, I find it particularly annoying that the arxiv translator populates the extra field, since I use that to add some information I'm interested.
After importing a bunch of articles from arxiv my extra column gets filled with random information I don't care about.

I would like to have a way to disable certain fields from being filled by translators.
  • adamsmith
    Given the number of Zotero translators, I don't think this can reasonably be prefed, sorry. You'd have to modify your version of the translatorhttps://www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators/coding
  • dcrucio
    I'll take a look at modifying the translators, but going through all of the ones I use seems quite a big chore.
    I would imagine however that zotero could just discard any edit from the translators in a certain field.

    What I would like is that if I disable the extra field from being modified, whenever a translator tries to write to that field, the information is discarded and not placed in there.
  • adamsmith
    One problem with that is that some of the things that translators store in Extra are pretty essential -- e.g. DOIs for item types that don't currently include a DOI field (as well as other currently unsupported fields), so disabling this globally would just be a terrible idea.
  • dcrucio
    Sure, but if I'm manually disabling it I would accept that something might break.
    If I know that it won't write the DOI for books for example I'd take care to manually add it in if I'm interested in that.
    Anyways, this doesn't have to be specific with the extra field.
    For example I don't use the abstract field at all, disabling it would make my library cleaner and with less data to store.
  • emilianoeheyns
    @dcrucio why not use notes instead of the extra field?
  • adamsmith
    More generally, though -- I doubt this is the type of customization that Zotero devs would decide to include: it seems fairly niche and has massive potential to confuse and complicated troubleshooting. Like almost anything else, it could probably be put into an add-on.
  • dcrucio
    @emilianoeheyns That doesn't show up in the columns.
    I want to write some information about the article that I can immediately see as a column field.
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