"No translator could be found" for Import from Clipboard

I apologize if this topic has already been covered, but I couldn't find it.

I get book reviews in my email and often want to add the book to my Zotero bibliography. For a long time, I've been simply copying the information, so I was thrilled when importing from the Clipboard was added.

I can't get it to work, though (I feel like such a noob). I select the text I want, copy it to the Clipboard, and choose Import from Clipboard from the gears menu in Zotero (I've also tried using the keyboard shortcut), and all that happens is that I get the "No translator could be found..." message.

Is there something in my setup that I'm missing? I'm running the latest beta of Zotero in Firefox 3.0.14 under Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a MacBookPro.

Thank you so much!
  • What "text" are you trying to import? Import from Clipboard is just a substitute for the standard gear menu Import command, so you can copy RIS, BibTeX, or MODS to the clipboard and use Import from Clipboard to import it.
  • Hi, Dan,

    I'm copying formatted text from an email, a text clipping in other words. Here it is: Helen Lovatt, Statius and Epic Games. Sport, Politics, and Poetics in the Thebaid. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 336. ISBN 0521847427.

    The formatting doesn't need to be preserved. I just don't want to have to type everything out or cut and paste in eight different fields. Lazy, huh? %^)
  • that isn't possibel and won't be for a long time
    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies
  • Hi, adamsmith, and thank you very much for the explanation, even though it wasn't what I had hoped to hear. I'll experiment with cb2Bib and Simple Text Query. I appreciate your help!
  • Seems to me your best bet is to copy/paste the author and title into google scholar and use the zotero translator from either the search results page or the overview page within google books. It works reasonably well (though not perfectly--the search results page does better with the title, but the google books page does better with ISBN) with the reference you included here.
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