"script not responding" chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/citeproc.js:6754

mcsugarfree

Hi. I'm on a Macbook Pro. I just upgraded firefox (it prompted me yesterday) to 3.6.14. I'm running Zotero 2.1b7.

Now, when I try to add multiple citations into Word (this has worked fine in the past, BTW) I get the spinning ball of death and eventually the message:

"A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/citeproc.js:6754"

Why does it say "chrome"?
Should I just roll back firefox? If so, is there an easy way to do this (like, some sort of automated way to do it from within firefox)?

thanks.

mcsugarfree

...

adamsmith

while this shouldn't happen on a Mac, this most likely still applies:
http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/unresponsive_script_warning

"chrome" has nothing to do with the browser of the same nam, but is the protocol Zotero is using.

mcsugarfree

thanks for your reply. however, i tried (and _had_ tried) just letting the script run (as the page you directed me to says), but that just seemed to go on forever--firefox stayed hung and the citations were never added to my document.

now it's getting worse. trying to add a single citation to my word document crashes firefox. before only multiple citations caused a problem, now even single citations are problematic.

dstillman

What if you change the bibliography style?

mcsugarfree

i can't test it, 'cause any attempt to add a citation in word causes firefox to hang. word puts a {citation} field marker in the text and then thinks its finished with the process. none of the zotero dialogs open. crap. i'm thinking of trying to downgrading to the previous build of firefox...

adamsmith

so just to clarify, you get the same issue when you click on "document settings" (which is where you'd change the style) in the Zotero Word plugin?

mcsugarfree

yeah. it definitely hangs when i open 'document preferences' in the zotero word plugin. the weird thing seems to be that _other_ word documents (like, for example, new ones that i create to test this) don't make firefox hang.

BTW i reverted back to firefox 3.6.13 and nothing seems to be any better.

adamsmith

Next step would probably be this:
http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents

mcsugarfree

ugh. i got all the way through this 'til i tried to find the problematic citation. as i've posted elsewhere on this site, zotero causes word to crash [i know that this is "impossible," but...]. this means that between firefox crashing and word crashing, it's a horribly time consuming and frustrating process trying to find the bad citation. everything is hanging and crashing constantly. also, both "halves" of my document seem to possess problematic citations, if in fact the problem is actually a "bad' citation--i.e. when i delete half of the document firefox hangs and when i delete the other half firefox hangs. and then word crashes--again.

fbennett

mcsugarfree,

Do you get this with a fresh document, or does it only affect a particular document?

Here's the thinking. The error you're getting comes from the citation processor. It looks as though it is getting stuck in a loop while attempting to generate output. The only part of the processor where that can happen is during disambiguation. There is a possibility that this is not caused by the upgrade, but that you have hit a combination of citations that the processor cannot resolve, and instead of failing gracefully, it is repeating the attempt ad infinitum.

That's just a guess at this point; to narrow this down and be sure it can't happen again, I'll need some more information. The answer to the question above will tell whether this intuition may be correct, or whether the problem lies elsewhere.

I'll look forward to hearing more news.

Frank Bennett

mcsugarfree

frank,

everything seems to work great in a fresh document. it is only the dissertation chapter that is due _tomorrow_ and that i need to be working on(!) that causes the problems.

thanks.

fbennett

Ah, thanks, this is all useful.

Good to know that this is triggered by a particular document. Good move with downgrading; the continued failure tells us that a change in Firefox is not the cause. Together, those two observations suggest that there is a possibility, at least, that some combination of otherwise innocent input has triggered this on you. I'm keen get you back to work, and to pin down whether that is the case.

Can you send me a copy of a (hopefully relatively small) document that is failing on you? My email name is biercenator, the after-at portion is gmail.com. If I can get it failing on my own system, it will speed things up.

mcsugarfree

ok. i've been playing around with trying to change citation styles using the zotero document preferences in word.

when i try to change to "MLA" it gets halfway through the document and then stops, telling me that a particular citation (the same one each time) is "undefined" (or something like that, i couldn't highlight the message to save it and it went away). then, when i tried to change citation style back to "MLA without biblio" it replaced all the citations with "0/0/0/ 00:00AM" EXCEPT for the footnotes that also had text in them (like, for example, "see also" preceding a citation). those came out fine--only the "unmodified" citations turned into zeros.

fbennett

If poss -- if it's inside several megabytes -- also send along a copy of the zotero.sqlite (gear menu, Preferences, Advances, Show Data Folder) on which the document depends. Failing that, an RDF export of the references it uses.

dstillman

also, both "halves" of my document seem to possess problematic citations, if in fact the problem is actually a "bad' citation--i.e. when i delete half of the document firefox hangs and when i delete the other half firefox hangs. and then word crashes--again.

There's nothing magic about halves—the problem could exist in both halves, which just means you need to try half of that again. The goal is simply to isolate the smallest possible set of citations that reproduces the problem in as few steps as possible.

mcsugarfree

@Dan, i gotchu. i just couldn't face everything crashing again and again and again as i tried to narrow it down...

Simon

Since your work is due tomorrow, and this apparently worked previously, you could try downgrading to Zotero 2.1b5 and see if that works. Also, can you tell us what style you're using?

mcsugarfree

"Modern Humanities Research Association (without Bibliography)" is the really problematic one...

Also, I tried downgrading zotero but no dice.

I've watched pretty carefully each time I try to change the citation style. It appears that Zotero makes an initial "pass" through the document during which it places "0/0/0 00:00AM" everywhere that it plans to put a citation. In my case, it never makes it all the way through--it always stops somewhere in the middle, giving me the "citation undefined" message.

if i try to "refresh" my citations (many of which are the strings of "0"s mentioned in the paragraph above) when firefox is open, firefox hangs and nothing gets refreshed. if i try to refresh my citations with firefox closed ('cause, 'hey, why not?'), word hangs and needs to be force quitted.

mcsugarfree

I've watched pretty carefully each time I try to change the citation style. It appears that Zotero makes an initial "pass" through the document during which it places "0/0/0 00:00AM" everywhere that it plans to put a citation. In my case, it never makes it all the way through--it always stops somewhere in the middle, giving me the "citation undefined" message.

if i try to "refresh" my citations (many of which are the strings of "0"s mentioned in the paragraph above) when firefox is open, firefox hangs and nothing gets refreshed. if i try to refresh my citations with firefox closed ('cause, 'hey, why not?'), word hangs and needs to be force quitted.

fbennett

I have a copy of the document (originally in Word, as a docx file) here, and I'm slightly puzzled by one thing. Simon may be able to clear up my confusion. The document is built with "Field" as the fieldType. I assume that this stands for Bookmarks, as I noticed in other files that Reference Marks are specified with the keyword "ReferenceMark"). Attempting to refresh the document in Open Office throws an error, saying that "Field" is an invalid field type. From a trawl around the forums, I learned that the vanilla Open Office 3.3 plays better with switching between the two forms, so I installed that for use in testing.

Beginning to play with Bookmarks, I brought up the word processor popup, and this time I actually read the descriptive text under Bookmarks (which I should have done earlier). It says:

Bookmarks are preserved across Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, but may be accidentally modified. For compatibility reasons, citations cannot be inserted into footnotes or endnotes when this option is selected.

I'm puzzled. The document is set to a note style (mhra_note_without_bibliography), and so seems to have an impossible combination of options (note style + bookmarks). I must be missing something, but I'm not sure what. Is this combination possible in Word?

adamsmith

Frank: "Fields" are to Word what "Reference Marks" are to Ooo - they are a Word only feature.

fbennett

Ah. That's helpful. So the document can't be read in Open Office in this form. I understand now, thanks.

mcsugarfree

[fbennet hooked me up with a "flattened" version of my file that has the _text_ of the citations, at least (they're no longer connected to zotero, but at least i have the data...)]

so...any suggestions about where to go from here? i mean, was this a weird one-off malfunction such that if i "start again" with a new word document (say, the introductory chapter that i still need to write) things might be ok? i have no sense of what actually went wrong, so i'm not sure how to proceed...

is there some series of re-installs i should do? is there a bad citation i should excise? is the next logical step really trying to track down the "bad" citation, or is the "bad" citation a symptom of programs not playing well together (a phenomenon that already plagues the firefox-macword-zotero setup i have)?

basically, i could use some guidance about whether i should continue (given this situation) to invest in zotero...(and i'm DEEPLY appreciative of the time various folks have spent responding to/helping me here)

dstillman

mcsugarfree: We told you how to debug it above, with the Debugging Broken Documents steps. Finding the smallest possible set of citations that causes this is the only way to find the problem—which, again, nobody else has reported.

If you want to zip and send zotero.sqlite and the document to support@zot....org, we can look into it. Otherwise you're going to have to do it yourself. Or you can ignore it, but then it won't get fixed.

mcsugarfree

@Dan, thanks for the clarity.

If I read you right: the problem I am having is unique and specific to my situation, but at the same time is recognizable as an example of a class of problems that you guys call "Broken Documents." The way to fix the problem is by attacking it as a "Broken Document"--in this case, since i've already tried the other strategies on the protocol for fixing "Broken Documents," to find the problematic citation.

Am i correct in assuming that you're fairly confident that this does not represent an intractable, systemic problem of a larger sort--one that will bedevil future documents?

I have sent the file (which, BTW, will tell you more than ever wanted to know about homosexuality in the English Renaissance) to support[@]zot.....org.

Thanks.

dstillman

Correct on all counts. We'll see if we can reproduce it with your file.

Simon

It seems like there were two issues at work here. The first was whatever was leading to the hang, which Frank seems to have fixed in the weeks since Zotero 2.1b7 was released. The second was a bug in the code that communicates with the word processor, which we're very happy you caught.

Since your paper is due tomorrow, you may want to install the Zotero Trunk XPI, which should fix the issues with your document. The warnings there may not apply at this time because we've made only minor bug fixes since the 2.1b7 release, but it's always a good idea to back up your Zotero library and your document. Additionally, you should make absolutely sure to manually install the next version of Zotero from zotero.org when it comes out later this week, since otherwise you'll be receiving new trunk XPIs, which may not be as stable as this one.