Upgrade StorageExport of all subcollections of a collection
I would like to export the contents of all subcollections of a collection.
At
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9102/
I read that for this you have to enable "recursive collections".
But if you do, then you also will *see* all the papers in the subcollections
during browsing -- which makes subcollections less useful:
I keep general papers here and not-yet-subcategorized papers.
For me it would make sense to have an option that enables
"recursive collections" only for exporting. (Especially for exporting
to bibtex.)
Do others have the same problem? And if so, would it be difficult
to implement?
Lars
At
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9102/
I read that for this you have to enable "recursive collections".
But if you do, then you also will *see* all the papers in the subcollections
during browsing -- which makes subcollections less useful:
I keep general papers here and not-yet-subcategorized papers.
For me it would make sense to have an option that enables
"recursive collections" only for exporting. (Especially for exporting
to bibtex.)
Do others have the same problem? And if so, would it be difficult
to implement?
Lars
I personally think that having a "recurse-on-export-only" option would be needlessly confusing & relatively pointless. But it might be useful to be able to select multiple collections in the left-most pane. Or it might be useful to be able to toggle the recursive setting more easily (as suggested in https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/493).
to export. this is annoying.
I do not know how others use the categories. But I try to have
fine-grained subcategories with 10-20 papers each and a narrow
topic. This is great for browsing and organisation. But if one writes
a paper, one seldom needs such a narrow bibliography. The supercategory
is the right granularity for the export.
The "recursive collection" option does not solve this problem as pointed
out in my original post -- so even if you make it more easily accessible
(it is sufficient accessible for me...), it would not help. (By the way,
the option seems only to make the display recursive, but not the export).
What would be helpful is an option for "recursive export", even if it is not
among the visible preferences, but just a hidden one.
Another work-around could be to export the whole group library. But if
I understand it correctly this is not possible either (one only can export the
whole "My Library") ?
- Lars
at all. (because then you would always *see* all the papers in the subcollection,
which is not what I want -- the very reason for the subcollections is to organize
a collection that became too large).
Multiple collection selection would mitigate the problem to some extent, but
still be less user-friendly than the "recursive export" option. Just imagine:
with the option, I have to enable it once and can forget about it. With the
multiple collection selection every time I have to export a paper (= every time
I added a reference and want to rebuild my latex file, so lots of times a day),
I have to remember to select the folder and all of its subfolders.
I agree that multiple collection selection is useful in many other circumstances
and a nice feature to have. But the "recursive export option" seems to be simpler
to me and more useful for the problem of (bibtex) exports.
- lars
p.s. thinking about doing the bibtex export manually every time, it would be great
to have a commandline script that exports given folders to bibtex without user
interaction. I could imagine something like
zotero2bibtex [-r] <collection>*
that exports all the given collections to stdout (needless to say: "-r" is for
recursive exports ;) ).-- this could be the "wordprocessor plugin for latex" that
others have been looking for already:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/146/integration-with-latex/
I want to export whole (sub)collections with their subcollections, but do not want to see recursively always every entry. I expected, that if I right click on a collection folder I am able to export all containing entries. But I only get the entries in the parent folder in the resulting bibtex-file. This is not intuitive. (Changing the recursive property does not change this behaviour although you can see all entries below...)
But for now multiple selection will do, thanks for that.
Actually, I have no idea how to "multiple select" my (sub)collections. Ctrl (or shift) - click doesn't work in collections.
When viewing the top collection I see all items of all subcollections, when I right-click and export to bibtex, it exports not a single entry, because the top-folder is empty, I have to mark all entries in the right window and "export items"
if you only want to export the collections as file (and not as bibliography), you can use my addon Zotero autoexport. From this version it allows to export in batch mode collections, subcollections, saved searchs and group searchs. Automatically or manually like you want. For starting the batch export click in the Zotero menu to the new command Export collections.. then you are able to select destination, filetype, etc.
For any suggestions or help, do not hesitate to contact me!
Robert
Cheers,
Andreas
I think most people just use Better BibTeX to keep a full (or partial) database in sync with a .bib file.