Copying a citation vs copying a bibliography item

[przemyslslaw]

Hi,

Thank you for developing this very useful plug-in.

I've set it up so that Ctrl+Shift+C copies the Latex citation, e.g., \cite{Einstein}, but what I'd like to have instead is use Ctrl+Shift+A for the citation, while Ctrl+Shift+C for the human-readable bibliography item, e.g., Einstein, Albert (1931). On the cosmological problem of the general theory of relativity. Sonderasugabe aus den Sitzungsb. König. Preuss. Akad.: 235–237, since I use both in my workflows.

Is this possible to do this? If not, then how else can I quickly copy either of these two? In Mendeley, there is a "Copy as..." dialog accessible under right click, which makes both available, but this feature doesn't exist in Zotero or I don't know how to access it yet.

Your help would be greatly appreciated!

[retorquere]

Zotero has chosen to omit the infrastructure for this kind of thing. It'd be hard and fragile to break into that, sorry.

[retorquere]

The hotkey handling happens deep inside a function in Zotero where I can't easily change Zotero's behavior. The one path (ctrl-A or ctrl-C, I forget which) just has a hard "do nothing here" if you choose a translator instead of a CSL style. There's nothing to assign any behavior to for that shortcut when a translator is selected.

BBT isn't involved in shortcut handling in any way. Zotero has implemented shortcuts, and you can either assign a CSL style to these shortcuts, which gives you both behaviors, or a translator, which gives you exactly one. You get to pick the translator, and if you pick BBT, that gets ran, but BBT does not know whether it is being invoked for a shortcut, a regular export or something else.

If Zotero allowed you to pick a 2nd translator for the other shortcut, it would Just Work, and I would have to do nothing else.

[przemyslslaw]

Thank you for this detailed answer! That's a bummer. I'll open a Zotero feature request. Honestly, I may end up continuing to use Mendeley because of this :-/

[retorquere]

It'd be a relatively simple change as far as I can tell. There'd need to be a selection list to select the 2nd translator, and a few lines copied to call the same code, just with the 2nd translator when "asCitations" mode is selected.

[retorquere]

It looks like Zutilo has the option to run a 2nd translator: https://github.com/wshanks/Zutilo/blob/master/docs/COMMANDS.md (search for QuickCopy items). I don't know what shortcut it assigns for it though.

[przemyslslaw]

Wonderful -- I'll give it a shot -- many thanks!