Invalid citations

SalishSea

There is a very rational, incremental, strategy for sorting out invalid citations described here:

See http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents.

So, when the document "goes south" there is a rational strategy, but it can be a painful one.

Might Zotero be adapted to throw a more informative set of errors when it does not find a citation reference?

Overall this is a fantastic tool, and has changed by research and writing life more than any other technological change in the last decade. Thank you so much!

adamsmith

If Zotero just doesn't find a citation the document isn't broken - Zotero will highlight the citation in question and throw a very informative error (citation has been deleted... or so).

Documents break very, very rarely and the causes are not well understood (and those errors manifest themselves in various ways - odd formatting, wrong citation content etc.), so I doubt this can be helped - the closest you come to a more informative message is to check the field codes as suggested in the guide.

SalishSea

OK, then perhaps I mis-spoke.

Several of us are dealing with broken documents today... some combination of FF6, OO3, Linux, and current plugins.

See:

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5968/illegalargumentexception-under-oo3-on-linux

The associated error report is certainly cryptic and it is that that I was hoping could be improved.

R

adamsmith

In that thread there is one single person posting (everything else is from 2009) - Zotero can only create more informative error reports if an error is replicable - essentially devs need to write into Zotero - "if you see this error pattern, display this message" - that is why Simon is asking for a copy of the document in that thread .
This is an unforseen error and so the integration dumps the whole code in the error message. Ideally that error shouldn't occur in the first place (another reason Simon wants the doc).
If there are indeed several of you, please don't just fix the error but do as Simon ask and send the broken document to the address he mentions so this can be fixed.