Faulty character encoding of citations

JeanDePierre
I reinstalled Zotero yesterday; all seems fine except that when I try to "Quick Copy" (using CTRL+SHIFT+A) a citation into a wordprocessor, I get encoding errors, e.g.:

��Helena Katalin Sz�pe, <�i>Venice Illuminated: Power and Painting in Renaissance Manuscripts<�/i> (New Haven, CT/ ; London, England: Yale University Press, 2018).

which should be:

Helena Katalin Szépe, Venice Illuminated: Power and Painting in Renaissance Manuscripts (New Haven, CT ; London, England: Yale University Press, 2018). [with the accent in the author's name, the title in italics, etc]

I expect it's an easy fix, but I can't see where to make the change.

Thanks in advance!
  • dstillman
    What are you pasting into? Zotero of course copies Unicode to the clipboard.
  • JeanDePierre
    I am mainly working in Google Docs for the current project.

    Now you mention it, I also tried pasting some citations into LibreOffice Writer, and when I press CTRL+V to paste, it works as I want it to.

    So ... ?
  • dstillman
    What OS and browser?

    I don't recall previous reports of this with Quick Copy into Google Docs, but is there a reason you're not just using the Google Docs plugin?
  • JeanDePierre
    Sorry: I should have said that I am using Chromium (Version 117.0.5938.88 (Official Build)) and Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS.

    And I also forgot to thank you for trying to help -- but it is much appreciated :-)

    I had never used the plugin before, and experimenting with it now it's not clear to me what its advantages *should* be. And it seems glitchy, which make me wonder if for example other plugins such as uBlock Origin (anti-tracker) are causing problems. In Google Docs, if I use CTRL+ALT+C, or the 'Z' icon, I get a message "Zotero is updating your document.
    Please wait…" and then it basically hangs, having inserted a footnote like this: "{Updating}"
  • dstillman
    edited September 26, 2023
    I'm going to go out on a limb and blame something about your Linux install here. This definitely isn't a problem in general.
    I had never used the plugin before, and experimenting with it now it's not clear to me what its advantages *should* be.
    It gives you all the advantages of the word processor plugins:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_integration
    I get a message "Zotero is updating your document.
    Please wait…" and then it basically hangs, having inserted a footnote like this: "{Updating}"
    Make sure the Document Preferences window isn't just behind your other windows. If you're sure it's not, you should try disabling all other browser extensions and reloading Google Docs.

    If you're still having trouble, provide a Debug ID from Zotero for reloading Google Docs and reproducing this.
  • JeanDePierre
    I now think it may be a Chromium-specific issue: I tried opening a Google Doc in Firefox, and if I CTRL+V to paste a citation, the formatting appears correctly. Weird, huh?
    (So the problem is not my Linux setup, and and it's not a Chromium plugin issue, I already have them disabled for Google Docs because of other issues).
    If I find a solution/explanation I'll try to remember to come back here and record it.

    Anyway, thanks for your help.
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