Zotero is slow

clement

Hi,

I have about 4000 items in my library, and a complex LibreOffice document (350 pages, tables, figures, cross-references, 700+ bibliographical references) that I wrote on Mac OS (10.9.4). My computer is a core duo 2.4 Ghz computer, with an SSD drive.

It takes about 8 minutes to edit or insert a citation, and about 1 minute to delete a citation. In practice, it would be a huge waste of time to work with such a situation.

Is it a "normal" behavior? Are there ways to speed this up?

Thanks,
Clement.

adamsmith

This is about normal for a document of that size, yes.
Deleting the bibliography until you're done might help a little.

Using http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/ would be a way to do this a lot faster, but you wouldn't have live citations. You can convert an existing document to the markers used by the add-on.

adamsmith

The other obviously solution is to write in chapters and only assemble at the end. Most people I know writing book manuscripts or doctoral theses do that anyway since it also makes revisions, soliciting comments etc. easier.
Screws with your cross-references, obviously, but I'd be dubious about their value across chapters anyway.

clement

Thanks for these two tips.
(I had not seen your message here when I wrote my reply to the other thread).

But I still think an effort from the developer side would be most welcome.

All the best,
Clement.

adamsmith

There's only so much devs can do, since a lot of the delay is about the communication between Zotero and LibreOffice (it's actually much worse on Mac Word).
fbennett has thrown out (and implemented in the processor) one idea that I'd like to try out some time this year (Essentially don't update citations contextually at all - i.e. not for position, not for disambiguation unless you press the Refresh button. That should make inserting pretty much immediate).

The other thing is, though: Zotero isn't really involved in the process of deleting citations, unless you mean removing an item from an existing citation. So if just deleting a footnotes takes 1minute, that's entirely a LibreOffice issue.

clement

Good point about the chapter division.

I am a big fan of cross-references, which is convenient for readers who skim instead or before reading. I actually never tried, but if there could be a way to keep cross-references with a master document and several chapters, they might be preserved. (But that's a LibreOffice issue).

Regarding the assembling process, it can be very painful, and if you need to re-work your document, it would mean you need to disassemble, etc. It's not very user-friendly. Maybe the trick would be to switch to ODF-scan mode (which becomes similar to LaTeX/BibteX actually) after assembling?

Thanks again for your feedback.
Clement.

clement

Re: the communication between Zotero and Libreoffice: is the Zotero Standalone faster or slower than the Firefox plugin?

Re: fbennett's idea: please do try new ideas to improve the speed! :)

Re: Regarding deleting citation, I meant indeed removing an item in a multiple citation field.

adamsmith

In my experience, Standalone is a little faster, but not by much.