Working with old ODT files containing Zotero citations

I've been using Zotero since 2006 or thereabouts. Recently, I've been editing old ODT files that I hadn't touched for years and that are giving me trouble with Zotero now, crashing Firefox when I try to insert a new citation.

For instance, I've just tried to update an ODT file I hadn't edited since October 2008. There are Zotero citations in the document, and hitting Zotero's 'insert' button to insert another citation results in nothing at all -- except that Firefox crashes, making it impossible to add citations to any other documents until the Firefox process is manually killed and the browser is restarted (closing Firefox the normal way doesn't stop the runaway process).

In the past, I've managed to solve similar issues simply by copying and pasting the contents of an old document into a new one. This doesn't work now: After I copy the contents into a new file, Firefox simply crashes differently, after a different process: I now get to pick an item from the database and I get to the point where the {citation} placeholder appears in the document, but then the process hangs and Firefox crashes.

Are there any recommended ways to deal with this?

[Zotero 4.0.21.5, LibreOffice 4.2.4.2, Firefox 30.0 (Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical-1.0), Ubuntu 14.04]
  • Firefox crashes as in actually shutting down?
  • No, as in freezing and becoming unavailable to Zotero: no further citations can be added even to the most recent files. Web browsing is unaffected, but Firefox needs to be killed and restarted rather than just closed and restarted for Zotero to work again.

    Sorry for the lack of clarity.
  • One thing, as a workaround, you could try is to convert the document to markers and then back to citations using:
    http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/
    That might work to update the citation format, though no guarantees (you should obviously not overwrite your original files, but the add-on doesn't by default do that anyway).

    If that doesn't work or you don't want to go that route, the next troubleshooting step would be to see if you can generate debug output from Zotero - either via the regular debug option or, if that freezes and becomes unresponsive, too, using real-time debug:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output
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