[BUG] MacOS LibreOffice crash on insert citation

PeterNSteinmetz

I am working on a somewhat larger (10.3MB) LibreOffice (version 24.2.3.2 aarch64) on Mac OS 14.2.1 with Zotero (version 6.0.37).

I was able to insert a fair number of citations (about 20) but when I try and insert another it hangs and the spinning wheel cursor comes up. I have to force quit both LibreOffice and Zotero. When I start again the same thing happens.

There is a diagnostics report available regarding the spinning (too big to include).

Any suggestions on how to debug and pursue this? I like Zotero but to be useful for academic publications, this needs to work.

PeterNSteinmetz

I proceeded by cutting down the document in binary halving and isolated just that section which causes it to spin. It appears to be a prior reference that was being inserted and modified when I believe something strange happened in the UI and I first had to force quit LibreOffice.

I can provide the exact section of the content.xml from the .odt file if anyone wants to take a look. It clearly would be best if the parser was more robust and tolerated whatever happened here rather than causing these spinning wheels.

PeterNSteinmetz

A bit more insertions of citations and a similar thing happened again. I think the "strange thing" which happened was something which caused it to put up a dialog saying there had been a "Zotero integration error".

So it seems like after this happens the document is left in a devil state.

PeterNSteinmetz

After dissecting the exact location and disassembling the file, it became clear there was an embedded __Ddelink element that was not showing up in the normal view and was causing the parsing error. If one tries to insert a citation right after such an element, it spins.

It was a bookmark which is visible in the dialog when you go to insert a new bookmark. Deleting that bookmark fixed the problem.

The parser for insertion should clearly skip this sort of text bookmark tag -

<text:bookmark text:name="__DdeLink__5609_3013834778"/

It does not appear that the exact name matters.

adomasven

A non-trivial number of bugs have been introduced with LibreOffice 24, so I suggest going back to version 7 and seeing if you can reproduce this, and if not - report it to LibreOffice. There is also a small possibility, that this is caused by some issue in Java, but given your troubleshooting I find it unlikely.

PeterNSteinmetz

Interesting. So version 7 does not spin. I reported it to LibreOffice per your suggestion.

adomasven

Could you post the ticket link here?

PeterNSteinmetz

Yes, the ticket at LibreOffice is https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161035