Unintelligibly long tooltips crash Compiz (Ubuntu)

mdoube
Hi,

I use Zotero in Open Office in Ubuntu (10.10). When I hover over an in-text citation with about 7 or more entries, the tooltip is extraordinarily long, which crashes Compiz effects. This is a known limitation in Compiz, but it raises the question - why are these unintelligible tooltips shown at all? Is it because I'm using the 2.1beta, in which case the tooltip might be handy debug output (although debug output could be accessed in a better way, I'm sure). If it is a production feature, the current state of tooltips is completely useless for ordinary users.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/567025
  • Simon
    Showing field codes as tooltips is a "feature" of OpenOffice.org ReferenceMarks. Unfortunately, there's not anything we can do about it.
  • mdoube
    edited February 4, 2011
    OK, thanks for the response, I'll upstream to Open Office.

    http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=116800
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/openoffice/+bug/712824
  • mdoube
    Open Office devs are trying to send this back to Zotero, but I assume that setting the ReferenceMark field code is part of how in-text citations work?
  • adamsmith
    yes. This gets solved on Ooo's end or not at all and they really should make it possible to turn the feature off as you suggest. (and it's a really lousy feature anyway - having a toggle function to display reference mark code - as Word has had for a long time - is so much better for all purposes - ease of use, clarity of display, troubleshooting/error reporting, hacking...)
  • mdoube
    Submitted an enhancement request to openoffice.org
    http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=116820
  • ajlyon
    edited February 5, 2011
    It might have been possible to design Zotero's inserted code to be more concise, but there's no reason that development should have to consider how pretty or short the code is. Maybe the LibreOffice people will be more understanding?

    [edited -- NeoOffice, which I originally mentioned, is Mac, where the whole Compiz issue is irrelevant.]
  • mdoube
    @ajlyon
    And LibreOffice becomes more relevant because Ubuntu 11.04 will ship with it rather than OpenOffice...

    Regardless of the OS, word processor variant or field code size, it's still lame to show uninformative information by default.
  • bdarcus
    Bigger picture, it'd be nice to move citations in OOo/LO to use the new RDF metadata fields, and to do in a way that ensures document portability.
  • ajlyon
    I just ran into this myself for the first time today, and boy is it annoying.
  • ajlyon
    Having run into this again, I can say that the only thing more annoying than Compiz crashing while editing a manuscript is trying to find a way to revive Compiz by looking up docs from a virtual TTY, or trying to navigate Zotero.org in Links.

    Someone needs to budge here... This presumably affects Mendeley users as well-- between the two, this probably bites just about everyone who does serious academic writing in OOo or LO under Linux.
  • ajlyon
    edited March 27, 2011
    Open a virtual TTY (Ctrl-Alt-F3, then login) and do:
    export DISPLAY=":0.0"
    compiz
    Things will come back to life.

    But man, this is still no fun.
  • ajlyon
    But there are hints that this might be fixed in Ubuntu 11.04: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/567025
  • mdoube
    You can also turn tooltips off (at least in Libre Office) Tools - Options - General - Tips (uncheck)
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