nisus.com

Zotero, an excellent open source citation manager (though that designation doesn't really do justice to what it does--http://www.zotero.org/), has implemented RTF scan functionality. While still in beta, it seems to work very well (for example, when changing between parenthetical citation styles and footnote styles, the scan introduces the footnotes and places the citations where they belong--no more cut and paste).

But strangely, it works less well with RTF documents saved in Nisus than with any other wp I've tested it with. For Zotero to produce a bibliography, one places the command {{Bibliography}} in the text that will be scanned. In documents saved with Nisus this does not work. I have cut and pasted into Word and saved the document as a RTF and I have also tested this with RTF documents exported from Scrivener and Mellel and they all worked fine (as long as I didn't open them in Nisus before the scan), so there seems to be something about with the way Nisus does RTF. I wonder if the developers would take a few minutes to to look into this, because it's really an annoying bug.

A ticket has been created by Zotero developers regarding the problems with the RTF scan. I urge the Nisus folks--who probably know best why their implementation of RTF works a bit differently from the rest--to give it a look.

https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1520

I have never used Zotero but I tend to think the reason why it fails in parsing Nisus RTF documents is that { and } are coded as \'7b and \'7d in RTF source instead of \{ and \}. If it is really the culprit, it would be pretty easy for Zotero people to fix the problem, I guess.

If that is really the cause of the problem, that's a pretty fundamental bug in the way Zotero interprets RTF files. Saving a literal curly brace (typed by a user) as \'7b or \'7d is completely valid. It may be that NWP is quirky in choosing this method over using \{ or \}, but it definitely shouldn't break or confuse Zotero. Well, all the same I'll file it as something for us to change.

What is the current status of Nisus' integration with Zotero? The posts I've seen are somewhat dated with the issue still up in the air.

Thanks,

Eric Weir

Following up on my own question, I'm wondering if with Zotero's announcement of intention to offer a significantly expanded application programming interface http://www.zotero.org/blog/zoteros-next-big-step/ Nisus is considering taking steps to integrate Zotero with Nisus Writer.

Thanks

I replied in your other/new thread on Zotero, but thought I'd also reply here for completeness.

This issue of scanning curly braces in RTF should be resolved now. We changed the way Nisus Writer saves curly braces in RTF so Zotero shouldn't get confused anymore. I don't know if Zotero ever fixed their RTF scanning to handle the other way curly braces can be emitted in RTF, but so long as you're using Nisus Writer Pro 1.3.1 or later you should be fine

martin wrote:....so long as you're using Nisus Writer Pro 1.3.1 or later you should be fine

Thanks, Martin. Glad to hear it.