github-young / zotero-better-authors Goto Github PK

I would like to keep that column more compact by showing only the last name and the initials of the first name: Smith, J. W.

It is already possible to add rich text formatting in the titles.
I would like to do the same for the authors columns provided by this plugin.
Is it already technically possible from the plugins interface? Or is it something that I need to ask Zotero? Or should it be asked in the devs discussion channel?

Examples of use case:

• Put the last name in bold in the Authors List
• Put the Last Author identifier as superscript

Eventually, more advanced formatting options would be nice also, like highlighting with a color, change color font, background color of the whole field,, underline, ...

Sorry, I realise it is a pre-release.

1695468456308 addons.xpi WARN Download of https://github.com/github-young/zotero-last-author/releases/latest/download/zotero-last-author.xpi failed: Expected addon version 3.0.0 instead of 2.1.2

Currently whenever the checkbox of the middle author is ticked or not, the text & the input box after this checkbox is always effective.

Is it possible to set the text and input box disabled (or at least change the font color to gray) when the checkbox is not ticked?

I got some examples from other plugins, for example zotero-pdf-translate:

I see in v3.3.0 that a 1 has been added in front of the first author if it is the only author.

Could you clarify what is its intended use case?

I am not sure how to use it.
At the moment, it breaks the sorting of the Authors List column.
Could you add an option to hide it?

This plugin seems good for me! But i can not install it. I have tried to put it into "add-on manager" in zotero 7.00 beta, but it does not work. How can i solve this? Thank you!

When importing to Zotero this item: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-5968-8_8
It imports 2 Authors and then 2 Editors.
The current behaviour of the plugin is to display the last Creator, so here the last Editor.
I only want to see the last Author in the Last Author column.

I have removed and reinstalled the plugin. But I still get an empty Last Author column.
The Report errors show:

1695554339589	addons.xpi	WARN	Checking C:\Program Files\Zotero\distribution\extensions for addons

[JavaScript Error: "NS_NOINTERFACE: " {file: "resource://gre/modules/ComponentUtils.jsm" line: 90}]
createInstance@resource://gre/modules/ComponentUtils.jsm:90:36


1695554341813	addons.xpi	WARN	Addon with ID undefined already installed, older version will be disabled

[JavaScript Error: "Error: Addon must include an id, version, and type" {file: "resource://gre/modules/addons/XPIProvider.jsm" line: 1710}]

[JavaScript Error: "Error: Addon must include an id, version, and type" {file: "resource://gre/modules/addons/XPIProvider.jsm" line: 1710}]

[JavaScript Error: "NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsITelemetry.getHistogramById]" {file: "resource://gre/modules/TerminatorTelemetry.jsm" line: 87}]

[JavaScript Error: "NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsITelemetry.getHistogramById]" {file: "resource://gre/modules/TerminatorTelemetry.jsm" line: 87}]

[JavaScript Error: "NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsITelemetry.getHistogramById]" {file: "resource://gre/modules/TerminatorTelemetry.jsm" line: 87}]

[JavaScript Error: "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.setIntPref]" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/plugins.js" line: 307}]

[JavaScript Error: "NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE" {file: "resource://gre/modules/PartitioningExceptionListService.jsm" line: 92}]

[JavaScript Error: "uncaught exception: undefined"]

[JavaScript Error: "NotFoundError: Could not get children of file(C:\Users\mjthoraval\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Zotero\Crash Reports\events) because it does not exist" {file: "resource://gre/modules/CrashManager.jsm" line: 682}]
_getUnprocessedEventsFiles/<@resource://gre/modules/CrashManager.jsm:682:12


[JavaScript Error: "Component returned failure code: 0x8052000e (NS_ERROR_FILE_IS_LOCKED) [mozIStorageService.backupDatabaseFile]" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/db.js" line: 1058}]

[JavaScript Error: "TypeError: emptyListMessage is null" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/standalone/standalone.js" line: 655}]
ZoteroStandalone</this.updateAddonsPane/<@chrome://zotero/content/standalone/standalone.js:655:7


appName => Zotero, version => 7.0.0-beta.40+24ae34104, os => Windows 10.0 19045, locale => en-GB, extensions => Zotero Better Authors (3.1.1, extension), Zotero PDF Preview (1.0.0-4, extension, disabled), Open PDF (0.0.1, extension, disabled), Zutilo Utility for Zotero (3.10.1a1, extension, disabled), Translate for Zotero (1.1.0-18, extension, disabled), Ethereal Style (3.1.2, extension, disabled), Better BibTex for Zotero (6.7.122, extension, disabled), Better Notes for Zotero (1.1.4-25, extension, disabled)

I was probably a bit too fast on my previous request to limit the column of the plugin only to Authors.
There are actually some Item Types for which it makes sense to show other types of Creators:

• Presentation -> Presenter
• Patent -> Inventor
• Video Recording -> Director
• Maybe others?

So it would be nice to either make a hard list of what is considered to be an Author, or make it an option to choose which ones to display.

I had mentionned this ealier, but I clarify the feature request here.

I would like to add another mode to display the authors: show all first N authors and then show et al.. So something similar to the Creator column, but with a bit more flexibility on the number of first authors to show.

Maybe the Displayed content settings could be simplified with a drop-down menu with the following 3 options:

• All
• Omit intermediate (show First N + ... + Last)
• et al. (show First N + et al.)

Then the First N authors parameter would be the same for the last 2 options (and obviously ignored for the first option).
You would just need to make sure that the Last author is still marked correctly in the 3rd option when it is in the First N authors.

Would it be possible to show the corresponding author(s) instead of the last author? They can often be different.
You mentioned the corresponding author in your post in the forum:

I had the same need for displaying the last author (or the corresponding author) in an individual column

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/443921#Comment_443921

I guess the assumption in that sentence is that the corresponding author is the last author?

It may be too ambitious, but I still wanted to mention it in case there is an easy solution.
I understand that Zotero does not store that information, so it would need to be stored in some format.
Also, I do not know any way to retrieve automatically the corresponding author(s) information on a paper.
I will be glad to be pointed to some other existing resources.

It is nice to have more functionalities in the new Authors List column.
But I still prefer keeping a separate column for the Last Author.
That column has a different purpose than the additional options, so I should not have to choose between one or the other.

Thinks your work!

There is a feature request: support patent's inventor.

It takes quite some time to test different options, as you need to close and restart Zotero every time to see the result.
It would be very useful to have a Preview tool to show what the results will look like in each column. This would make the tunning of parameters much faster.

A similar functionality is used for example in the Settings -> General -> File Renaming -> Customize Filename Format... -> Preview.

As discussed in a previous issue, I would like to be able to identify quickly if some authors have been omitted within a list of authors.

For example, let's uses these settings, showing only the last name of the first and last author:

If I have two items with the following authors list:

1. Smith1 / SmithLast
2. Smith1 / Smith2 / SmithLast

In the current configuration, both of them will be displayed as Smith1; SmithLast:

1. Smith1 / SmithLast -> Smith1; SmithLast
2. Smith1 / Smith2 / SmithLast -> Smith1; SmithLast

I would like to be able to distinguish these two items. For example with:

1. Smith1 / SmithLast -> Smith1; SmithLast
2. Smith1 / Smith2 / SmithLast -> Smith1; …SmithLast

This is still fairly compact and it adds useful information on the authors list.

I think that this was already implemented by @jstzwj in his PRs:

        const lastAuthorDisplayed: string = this.displayAuthorName(authors, authors.length - 1, sep);
        if (firstN < authors.length - 1) {
          return authorList.join(", ") + ", ..., " + lastAuthorDisplayed;
        } else if (firstN == authors.length - 1) {
          return authorList.join(", ") + ", " + lastAuthorDisplayed;
        } else {
          return authorList.join(", ");
        }

https://github.com/github-young/zotero-better-authors/blob/185890815740a539b6fb2dd90da6ac702a6b04db/src/modules/lastauthor.ts

But it slowly got rremoved over the iterations.

Zotero has an option to display single field authors: https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero#editing_items
In that case, the separator between the last name and the first name should be removed.

It would be nice if the plugin could identify all the names in Chinese characters (and probably other languages where it would be needed), and then differentiate the way they are displayed.

In the normal mode (full first name), the name should be simply displayed without separator between the last name and the first name: 刘伟明 instead of 刘, 伟明. Maybe make this an option in case some people still want to keep the separator with Chinese characters?

The option to display first names as initials does not work well with Chinese characters:

• 刘伟明 -> 刘, 伟.
• 李军 -> 李, 军.

The first name initials option should not affect the display of Chinese characters, where it should still display the full name normally.

Thank you very much for the nice plugin.
Just a small problem: items that do not have any author (files without a parent item, parent items without authors, child items and notes) should keep the Last Author field empty.
At the moment, they contain "test1TypeError: ..."

In the Authors List column, I get:

authorsError: Invalid author name order setting: undefined.

I guess it is simply a default value missing, as the error goes away after playing with the settings.

If you untick the Last author, the Last author symbol is ignored:

If I tick the Last author, I get back to the other issue.
So something probably needs to be fixed here.

Thank you very much for the new developments of the plugin!

It would be more flexible if the user could define the Name Separator as they want.

Same for all the different separators:

• Between last name and first name (I understand that it is the current Name Separator)
• Between the different authors (currently ;, but it could be , if not used between last name and first name)
• Separator in front of the last author if some other authors have been omitted (currently *, but it could be ; ...;, with the ; automatically varying when changing the Authors Separator)
• Separator between the first name initials (currently a space, but I have seen the initials without spacing in some journals, which could be helpful to be more compact)
• Eventually allow to remove the . after the initials.

With more variables in the preferences, an option to reset to the default values would be useful.

Another useful option would be to be able to set a different separator between the last name and first name for CJK characters. I would like to display 李军 instead of 李, 军.

[Small typo in the settings: Name Seperator -> Name Separator.]

对于博士论文，导师有时为contributor，但由于不是author此插件无法显示为最后一个作者。

This probably goes beyond the scope of this plugin, but I still wanted to mention it here, as similar tools would probably need to be used.

Some of the options would be:

• Choose the authors to display: first N authors and eventually add the last author
• Choose how to display the authors (only last name, last name followed by first name or the opposite order, keep only initials of the first name, ...)

Some previous plugins have made some steps in this direction:

• Full Creator (and this forked version or the previous versions for Zotero 5, like this one or that one). But they have not been updated for Zotero 7.
• It was mentioned in this post that the plugin Ethereal Style can also do that, but the plugin is too heavy and crashes my Zotero. I would just need the formatting of the creator column from that plugin. So it may be worth merging these functionalities here if they are not too complicated.

Am I missing another plugin doing that in Zotero 7?
There is an issue opened in the Zotero GitHub on this: zotero/zotero#2831

It is a bit confusing that the option to Display first name as initials is still visible even when I select the option to Only display last name. I would find it more intuitive to hide the first option if the second one is selected.
Maybe an exclusive choice between Full first name or First name as initials or No first name under the general category First Name would be more clear?

Some settings are relative to the formatting of a single author, while some settings are relative to the display of multiple authors.
Separating them in two different sections would probably be more clear.

If a separate Last Author column can be recovered, the options relative to that column should also be separated in another section.

If I display the first name of the authors, names in Chinese chacaters would appear as:
李, 军; 刘, 伟明
Instead, I would like to be able to display:
李军；刘伟明

So, it means two options for names in Chinese characters:

1. Remove the name separator ,
2. Change the separator between names from ; to the Chinese character ； or ，.

This is a small thing, but it would be much easier to read in the compact format.

I don't know if this would also apply to Japanese and Korean characters.

Thank you very much again for the recent improvements!

For some journals, they mix the author names between the English name and the CJK characters.
This does not work well with the first name initials.

Examples:

This paper https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0162449
Has last author: Deng, Daosheng (邓道盛)
It is currently displayed as: Deng, Daosheng(邓道盛)
The expected result would be: Deng, D.

This paper: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article/35/8/082101/2905561/Dispensing-uniform-droplets-of-phosphate-buffer
Has last author: Lee, Jinkee (이진기)
It is curently displayed as: Lee, J. (.
The expected result would be: Lee, J.
I am not sure why this one is treated differently from the previous one.
Anyway, some special characters should probably be excluded from being valid initials, like the parenthesis here.

This paper: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0129427
Has last author: Thoraval, Marie-Jean (陶益壮)
It is curently displayed as: Thoraval, MarieJean(陶益壮)
The expected result would be: Thoraval, M.-J.

Strictly speaking, this is probably wrong to put the CJK characters in the first name field. But considering that Zotero (as most publishers) cannot handle multilingual metadata at the moment, this is already not too bad.

The latest pre-release does not work for me. I get:
lastauthorError: Invalid author nameorder: auto.

当不显示末位作者，只显示第一作者时，是否可增加设置可以不加et al.？目前使用想设置为第一作者和末位作者为分开的两列，但是第一作者那列有et al.使得界面不简洁。

I am not sure what is happening here:

因为论文的导师也挺重要的，和通讯作者一样，期待能有这个功能。谢谢您。
好像知网Jasminum能抓取指导教师，小白一枚

At the moment, showing the first N authors will always keep the last author.
I would like to be able to recover the behaviour of the original Creator column, which shows et al. when there are 3 or more authors, but in that case only keep one author in front of the et al..
With more flexibility, for example after how many authors it should trigger the et al., and how many authors to keep in front of the et al..

The last author is repeated when using these settings:

You can simply untick the Last author to fix the problem, so it is not really a big issue. But I just put it here as a note for further considerations.

Thank you very much for all the improvements!

In the latest release v3.3.0, the style setting for the first name is a bit confusing: you can tick initials and none together, even though if you select none, the initials tick does not have any effect.

It may be better to put them in a drop-down menu?
Display first name as:

• Full
• Initials
• No

I had mentioned this in a previous issue, but I separate it here for clarity.

It is possible to set the value of the number of authors to display to be very high.
But a simple tick box to show all authors (which would hide the other irrelevant options) would make this more intuitive.

The plugin causes the Trash collection to not show anything. Other folders are normal, but when clicking on Trash, nothing is displayed in Trash, and then this will leads to nothing being displayed in any other folder. disabling the plugin and restarting is normal, enabling it reproduces.

14:53:51.246 1721739231245	addons.xpi	WARN	Checking /code/Zotero_linux-x86_64/distribution/extensions for addons
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Thank you very much for the new feature to display first name as initials.
I would prefer to abbreviate Smith, Jean-Jacques to Smith, J.-J..
See for example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/344537/automatic-hyphenatation-of-first-names-in-bibtex