MS Word integration using "track changes"
I believe it is already known that Zotero and MS Word's "track changes" feature do not get along well. Specifically, I've found that when inserting a new reference using Zotero when "track changes" is enabled, Zotero will delete all existing citations and clear the bibliography, and recreate them. This of course causes the "track changes" feature to mark all citations and the bibliography, even those that have not been changed. I assume may have something to do with looking for citations that need to be disambiguated. But it seems to me that it should be unnecessary to change citations and parts of the bibliography that are unaffected by a newly inserted citation.
I find "track changes" to be an invaluable feature when writing a paper with other authors. Having Zotero and this feature get along better would be a huge improvement in usability, at least for me.
I find "track changes" to be an invaluable feature when writing a paper with other authors. Having Zotero and this feature get along better would be a huge improvement in usability, at least for me.
What kind of behavior would you like to see from Zotero with 'track changes' turned on?
One option would be if zotero turns off 'tracking changes' while reformatting the old references and turns it one only when dealing with the fields that contain the newly inserted/modified reference.
I am not sure how applicable is this to the bibliography list (I thing it is edited as one block), or even if it is possible to turn on and off 'tracking changes' from zotero.
If it is possible to disable & enable "track changes" from Zotero (which can be accomplished by the shortcut key combination ctrl+shift+E in Office 2007, which makes me believe there should be some way for a plugin to do it?) that would be a decent solution, and is pretty much what I do now--disable, modify / add references, enable. But having Zotero do that automatically would make the process much less of a headache!
Zotero needs to handle much more than inserting unambiguous references in linear order using unsorted author date stile.
Imagine you also have a second paper by Smith et al published in 2003. Then the first citation should be converted (depending on the style) to (Smith et al 2003a) and the second to (Smith at al 2003b).
What about numbered styles, which are used in almost all science literature outside humanities? Inserting a citation would require renumbering of all citations that follow it. It gets even more complicated with numbered styles that require author-date sorting of the reference list. In this case you not only have to renumber the citations but also re-sort the reference list.
I did a quick search but couldn't find a way to control track changes through the word or openoffice APIs. It is possible that I missed it.
Re: disabling track changes, does this apply? http://www.xlmacros.com/content/how-set-and-reset-track-changes-using-word-vba I admit I don't actually know much about how Zotero communicates with Word so I'm sort of shooting in the dark here--figured it couldn't hurt though.