Zotero Reports and Firefox

DReese

Create Zotoro report from a rather large collection of more than, say 50- 100 notes.
Firefox (both ver 2.x and 3.x) will display only part of the contents.

Save the page as a Web Page Complete.
Open in Firefox and same result - page will display maybe the first 40 items then page will be blank.
(the page, including the blank part,will appear to be large enough to contain all the notes)
I have tried using other installations of Firefox with the same result.
I have tried disabling other add-ons and extensions.

If I open the page with Internet Explorer the data will display correctly.
I.E. the data is all there - just does not display in Firefox.
The amount of data that is displayed is not always the same from one time to another on the dame data - weird huh!
example at http://www.htwif.com/Notes/meltdown.html

dstillman

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3662/

Your example works in Firefox 3 for me, however.

DReese

Thanks for checking.
Did you scroll all the way to the bottom of the file?

dstillman

Did you scroll all the way to the bottom of the file?

Yup. Tried in 3.0, 3.0.1, and the latest nightly build. Firefox 2 and Camino (which still uses the Fx2 rendering engine) exhibited the glitch.

But I looked a bit more into the problem, and it seems it's being triggered by the "overflow: auto" line under ul.report in detail_screen.css. I've now removed that in the latest 1.0 dev build. The only effect the change should have, I believe, is that if there's an unbroken word (or a URL) longer than the fixed width of the report in content outside of the metadata table, it will extend out into the whitespace and only create a horizontal scrollbar if it extends past the edge of the browser window. Before it would create a horizontal scrollbar just for the fixed width.

DReese

In the past week I have tried to display the file on several other installations of FireFox and all I tried had the same problem. I am wondering if this is a FireFox and not a Zotero problem since IE seems to have no problem with the file. I did post to the FireFox forum but never got an answer - I'll try posting again. I have not tried any other browsers - perhaps some forum members with other browsers could try the file.

I have been having trouble with Zotero loosing data which could be part of the problem with that file but I'll start another thread for that.

dstillman

I am wondering if this is a FireFox and not a Zotero problem since IE seems to have no problem with the file.

Did you read my post above and the other thread I linked to? It's a Firefox (or Gecko, to be exact) bug, and it's being triggered by the CSS line above, which will be changed in 1.0.8 and you can fix yourself manually. It's just a display issue—there's no loss of data.

DReese

Dan,
Please overlook my ignorance. The last time I programmed a computer application was in the mid 80's and although it was a fairly complex accounting application the graphics were, well, non-existent. Cascading had a lot to do with waterfalls and nothing to do with computers. The world has changed a bit and I perhaps have not kept up.

I did read your post and the first thing I thought you said was that
"Your example works in Firefox 3 for me, however. " Then you said that "Firefox . . .exhibited the glitch."
You then indicating that you were fixing a css problem - now, since this is the Zotero forum I assumed that you were fixing a Zotero problem and not a FireFox problem.

I think there must be a law somewhere that it is a bad thing to confuse old people.
I understand that it can be an entertaining past time, but . . .

Now I am afraid to post my problems concerning Zotero lost data.

dstillman

Apologies for the confusion. I'll try to clarify:

• It's a bug in Firefox's rendering engine (which is called Gecko and is used by Firefox, Camino, Thunderbird, etc.).


• It's being triggered by a line in one of the CSS (i.e., style) files that Zotero uses to format reports. Something can still be a Firefox bug even if it's triggered by something in Zotero that we can change.


• We've only been able to reproduce it in Firefox 2 (and Camino, which uses the same version of Gecko as Firefox 2), but that doesn't mean it doesn't still exist under some circumstances in Firefox 3, as you observed.


• The line that was triggering the Firefox bug has been removed in the latest Zotero 1.0 development build, and the change will be included in 1.0.8.


• If you have existing reports, you can manually edit the CSS file as I explain above to avoid the glitch.

Hope that helps.