Citing on different computers

kappf

Hello,

I have a problem with working on a document on different computers. When I create a document at work and put in a few citations (on a PC) and then send it to my mac via email to continue work at home I get an error message when I try to put in new citations. It says:
An error occured while updating your document (in German).
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'/xe4' in position 163: ordinal not in range (128) (that part is in English)

I work with Firefox 3.6.4, Word for Mac 2008 12.2.5, Zotero 2.0.3 and Zotero MacWord Integration 3.0b2

Could you please help me with that? Any ideas?
Thanks!

Simon

Try installing the MacWord Integration Trunk XPI and see if that at least gives you a more useful error message.

kappf

Thanks! Ok, I did that. Now, when I try to insert a citation on my mac in a document I sent from the pc at work, it says (in German): This item does not exist any more in your zotero-database. Do you want to replace it with another item?
Then there is another paragraph explaining what happens, if I click "No", then the buttons Cancel, No and Yes.

Thinking about it, what might create the problem, is that the databases are the same for me on the surface, since, whenever I make changes, I export it and import it on the other computer. But the structure of the folders is probably different? Might that be the problem? I avoided syncing sofar, because I need the attached files and had problems with that especially when trying to sync from work (firewall of the company, I believe). Could that cause of the problem?

Best regards!

mark

Right, you nailed it. Exporting and importing does not maintain identity of the underlying database. In particular, the internal identifiers that the word plugin uses to link citations to your database are not the same anymore when you export and import stuff. The only way to solve this is to start syncing. See this page" for guidance; don't sync outright in your current setup because you'll end up with duplicate items.

Note that you can simply sync the metadata over the Z server and keep the attachment (everything in the /storage/ folder) in sync with another tool, if you can't or don't want to sync the attachments.