Help!My .doc doesn't show the literature anymore!

silpix

Hi, I have a big problem.
When I open my text in word, all the abbreviation-date references appear as a long code.
Moreover, everytime I add a citation, appears a window that doesn't disappear until I close Zotero. Please Help me, is my PhD Thesis!!!!
Thanks
These are the error codes
1156014086
1877220738

adomasven

You should make sure you have not edited any of the code you see as that might break existing citations. Press Alt+F9 (or Fn+Alt+F9, if your F keys perform media actions by default). That will make the codes disappear.

silpix

Thanks a lot...yes they disappeared!
But how can I avoid these window that says tome always that I've changed an existing citation?Whereaver I reply yes or not to keep the changes or not, sometimes the window appear again and again and I am forced to close zotero in order to close the window :-(

adomasven

That would be caused by you accidentally editing the codes you were seeing. If you have a backup of the document (which you should always keep), you could try working from that. Otherwise see https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents

adamsmith

@adomasven -- we're getting a lot more reports of the "citation has been modified" message than we used to since about 2-3months. Any thoughts on what might be going on? I'm not seeing any changes that could possible cause this, so maybe something on the Word side?

adomasven

@adamsmith -- There has been. I've only just recently started digging around in word processor plugin code and I'm still fairly clueless about the bulk of it (8 years of code!) aside from the fact that the parts that do the actual heavy-lifting of citing have not changed for the past 2 years or so. Could be something with citeproc-js, but I don't think citeproc-js actually touches the field codes. Maybe just a coincidence. In this instance I think it is reasonable to assume field codes have been accidentally modified.

On a somewhat related note Dan and I have been discussing some weird behaviour for prompting (and not prompting) about citation modifications in various circumstances -- there should be an issue on Github soon to have that discussion with a wider audience.

silpix

Dear Adam, dear Adomasven,
I tried all what is written on this link: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
...unfortunately no solution...the citation plug-in works two times and then again appears this windows about the changes that is impossible to close!
I tried with different titles, I checked image captions, bibliography....no way:(
I solved only this problem with field code thanks to this ALT + 9...but now I am afraid to use Zotero again :(
this is the brand new error number: 1836827542....I understood from your messages that I am not the only one, isnt' it?
Thanks a lot for your help, I am a bit densperate!

silpix

ps. I have Word 2007 and windows 7, maybe this could help you, I am not sure....

adomasven

While people do have these problems from time to time, they are due to corrupted field codes in the document (either by user mistake or sometimes bugs in Zotero) and are rarely possible to be fixed automatically. In this scenario, I am afraid, you probably edited the field codes by accident and Zotero is having trouble reading them.

Completely deleting and regenerating the bibliography might help. Otherwise I am afraid you will have to debug the document manually, using technique 8 as described in the troubleshooting guide. Make sure you make a copy of your current working document before proceeding, so you have something to get back to.

Rintze

@adomasven, it would be great if Zotero could tell the user which citations are corrupted. Making sure the JSON is well-formed and validates against the schema would probably highlight most problematic cases, and such citations could be marked by changing the field name (as Word itself e.g. does with its "Error! Reference source not found" warnings; see https://www.turbolaw.com/2007/10/dont-let-word-get-you-down-with-error-reference-source-not-found/).

adomasven

@Rintze I have thought about this myself and agree that something like this is needed. No timeline for the moment though.

Rintze

Great!

(in the meantime, http://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/ could be rather easily extended to throw alerts for fields that e.g. are invalid JSON, if anybody is looking for a simple JS coding project)