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ZotFlow 1.4.1

A small release about things ZotFlow was recording incorrectly and quietly: citation keys that lost half of themselves, and note titles that came out mangled. Nothing here changes how you work — it changes what ends up stored.

Updating is safe. Existing source notes keep their filenames, and existing citations you have already inserted are left alone. There is a one-time difference in note titles and citation keys after the next sync, described at the bottom.

Fixes

  • Citation keys are no longer cut short. A key like smith-2020 was being stored as smith — everything from the first hyphen or dot onward was dropped. Since Better BibTeX produces hyphenated keys routinely, this affected a lot of libraries. Keys are now read whole.
  • Note titles use the first paragraph. A multi-paragraph note used to be titled with all of its paragraphs run together into one line. Now it stops at the first one.
  • Escaped characters in note titles read normally. A note titled Tea & Coffee now shows as Tea & Coffee.
  • Notes that begin with formatting keep their title. If a note started with a lot of markup or blank space, the title could come out empty or truncated to nothing useful.
  • Links to related items point at the real note. When a template builds a link from an item's Zotero "Related" entries, it now uses where the note actually is, rather than where the path template says it would go. The two disagree whenever a note has been moved or renamed, or had a (1) added to avoid a filename clash. The citation preview in settings had the same problem.
  • Substantially more of the plugin is now covered by tests — sync, templates, notes, annotations, the reader bridge, the attachment cache and WebDAV — along with the bugs that writing those tests uncovered.

Changes you will see once

The next sync re-records titles and citation keys for items it touches. Two things are worth knowing:

  • Your source notes are not renamed. ZotFlow finds a note by the zotero-key in its frontmatter, not by recomputing its filename, so a note stays exactly where it is even though its citation key changed. Only notes created from now on use the full key in their filename.
  • Citations already written into your notes are not rewritten. If you inserted [@smith] before this release, it stays [@smith]; new insertions will be [@smith-2020].
If you export with Pandoc

The second point matters to you. Your .bib file has always had the full key (smith-2020), so the short [@smith] citations ZotFlow inserted were already not matching it. This release fixes new insertions but cannot go back and fix the ones already in your notes — those need a find-and-replace, or re-inserting.