Odd formatting change in LibreOffice writer - access to older versions of Zotero

jvbowler

Beginning a couple of months ago (I am not entirely sure when) a curious change began to appear in LibreOffice writer documents whereby the formatting was changed and a tab inserted. After quite a lot of trial and effort, this seems to occur either when a reference is inserted using Zotero or a bibliography is generated. I have a suspicion that this occurred following an update to Zotero and would like to go back to an old version to see if I can confirm this but I cannot see any way to access older versions. Can anyone point in the right direction?

Additionally, it would be easy to explain what is happening if I could upload the document template in which it is occurring but there also seems to be no way to do this.

adomasven

Can you reproduce this in a new document? If you can, make a small sample document and send it to support@zotero.org.

Also please clearly describe and post here the steps to reproduce the issue, what you're doing and what happens.

adomasven

@jvbowler I reviewed the documents you have sent us and I am not seeing any difference between the two, except that the second one contains a bibliography. I inserted a bibliography into the first document, but I didn't see any formatting differences that you have described. What version of LibreOffice are you using? You should be running 7.3.7.

jvbowler

Thanks for looking at this. I was intrigued that you could not see the formatting error. In fact I was using LO 7.4.2.3. I installed 7.3.7 in a completely clean Windows installation (Windows Sandbox) and it turns out you are entirely correct, the formatting error disappears. Doing the same with 7.4.x shows the formatting error and so it seems to be some kind of odd interaction between Zotero and LO 7.4.

For myself, I have reverted to 7.3. That will solve the problem for the time being but I suppose the question is whether this is the "fault" of LibreOffice or Zotero or some kind of obscure interaction between the two. I will post this in LO bugzilla but I wonder whether it would be worth somebody looking at it from the Zotero end?

adomasven

It's most likely the fault of LibreOffice 7.4. You could probably revert LibreOffice versions 5 years back and wouldn't see this behavior with the Zotero plugin, so something in the new version of LO is causing it. Perhaps it's new intended behavior and hopefully someone on the bugtracker will be able to say if it is. Otherwise it's a bug.

Either way, could you post a link to your bug report here?

jvbowler

It is:-

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152158