Zotero 4 Word plugin slow on Mac

JGebauer

I am trying to work with my PhD disstertation and zotero is unbearably slow with the large document. Can someone give me some tipps on how to speed it up?

Zotero 4 latest standalone
Word 2011
MacBook pro

The document is large...1800 Footnotes.

Any tipps appreciated, it takes hours to Refresh or do anything useful

adamsmith

There's really not much you can do, at this point, I'm afraid.. If you have a bibliography, remove it until it's needed. Otherwise, work as much in segments of the whole dissertation as possible. There are some very specific plans in place to speed things up significantly, but can't tell you when those will make it into live code.

JGebauer

Just wondering: is the latest Word faster in this respect?

adamsmith

I believe 2016 is faster -- though it'll still be a bit of a drag with that size document. The above-mentioned code is under review (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/1242 ticket is for info, don't comment there unless you have code-related comments) and so I'd hope we'll see that within the next couple of months..

JGebauer

Thanks. Just noticed Zotero 5 is out, I don't suppose it will improve things on this front, though?

(I am reluctant to change now anyway, as I will hand in in only a few days (hooray!!), but I would like to know whether the experience will be improved when I prepare for publication in a couple of months.)

adamsmith

Yeah, don't update now. It will _almost_ certainly not cause any problems, but in my book "almost" is way to high a risk before submitting a thesis. I wouldn't expect any speed improvements of the Word integration with 5.0, no, the word processor code hasn't been changed much (and I don't think performance-relevant parts at all).

JGebauer

Thanks! The quick responses are amazing, as always!

I will not change the system right now. I am glad it is sort of working well, if slowly, but usable with a split word file (although the mechanisms for this in Word are really buggy).