Nisus and Zotero

[Þorvarður]

Is anyone here using Zotero with Nisus Writer Pro?

[martin]

This question recently came up elsewhere. I personally don't have any direct experience with Zotero workflows, but this Zotero support page indicates that it's possible to copy-paste references and scan RTF document. If Zotero's scanning is handled properly this should provide a reliable way to conveniently use Nisus Writer and Zotero together.

[Þorvarður]

If Zotero's scanning is handled properly this should provide a reliable way to conveniently use Nisus Writer and Zotero together.

Zotero works well in MS Word, LibreOffice and GoogleDocs; and documents saved in RTF and ODF formats are to be scanned in order to create citations and a bibliography, much the same as in Bookends and Nisus.

The problem with Zotero is, however, that if you have an author whose name contains an umlaut or a diacritic, Zotero will fail to execute the RTF Scan command, thus making it impossible to create a bibliography.

The problem is well known among Zotero developers, but they are not interested in fixing it or are unable to do it. The answer I got from the developers last year was:

"Yeah, it looks like this was just never implemented — I think you're the first to report this in the 10+ years that RTF Scan has existed. (RTF Scan doesn't get a lot of use.)"

One developer wanted to know what's so special about Nisus and why I can't just use LibreOffice…
In the end they came up with the absurd idea I should write my paper in Nisus Writer, then export and use LibreOffice to scan it and create citations and the bibliography.

[martin]

The problem with Zotero is, however, that if you have an author whose name contains an umlaut or a diacritic, Zotero will fail to execute the RTF Scan command, thus making it impossible to create a bibliography.

The problem is well known among Zotero developers, but they are not interested in fixing it or are unable to do it.

That's a big shame. It's actually not difficult to support loading Unicode text with special characters from RTF files. In fact, I'd say it's much easier than supporting all of the various old legacy text encodings that are part of the official RTF specification.

I looked into this briefly and found some discussions on the Zotero forums and email lists. I think the core problem is that Zotero's RTF scanner doesn't really understand RTF. If a reference includes trivial formatting (e.g. bold) Zotero's scanner can also be confused, depending on the formatting's location. I don't know for certain but probably Zotero doesn't actually parse/decode the RTF at all. It only does a simple scan for text chunks that look like a reference, without ever understanding or decoding the RTF.

That explains why the Zotero developers aren't interested in fixing this oversight. It isn't a simple matter of adding Unicode support to their RTF decoding feature. They would instead need to actually build an RTF decoder from nothing, which is a large and complicated job.

[Axbax]

Hi, did anyone find a good way to use Nisus Writer Pro with Zotero? Or is there any plans to support the use of Zotero?

Thanks,
Ken