Text dissappears in Zotero Note if I "bold" it

shos6913

Hi I just started having a problem where if I am using Zotero Notes (in a separate window) and I bold a section of text, it dissappears. Anyone else having this problem? I have tried tyhe suggestions in another thread about clashes between in-pane notes and separate-pane notes, but nothing is working

dstillman

After it disappears, right-click on the note and select Source Code, and then copy the HTML and paste it here between <code> </code> tags.

shos6913

oh no - all the contents of the entire note has now dissappeared !!! yikes thats 3 days of note taking. Right clicking on note isn't doing anything - I am on a mac (maybe ctrl-click is not what you mean?)

dstillman

I mean right-click/control-click on the note itself, not the note item in the middle pane.

If you haven't clicked away from the note yet, try Cmd-Z.

dstillman

You should also immediately take a backup of all of the zotero.sqlite* files in your Zotero data directory without closing Zotero.

dstillman

(If you have been syncing, we may also be able to help you restore data from the server.)

dstillman

Yes, we can restore the note to your library for you. Let us know if you'd like us to do that.

shos6913

1. tried Cmd Z before - didnt work to return text.
2. Just backed up zotero.sqlite* files (though I am not sure whether I closed Zotero in the meantine)

Please do restore my note! Blood sweat and tears have gone into it!

shos6913

Also right-click/control-click on the note itself does not seem to do anything at all.

shos6913

But to reiterate - please do let me know what I need to do to get my note restored. The note included the memorable phrase "Mofussil Efflorescence" amongst others.

dstillman

OK, first restart Zotero — right-clicking on the white note background should definitely be showing a context menu, so if that's not happening something may not be working.

After that, sync, and the note should sync back down. After that, try right-clicking in the note and choosing Source Code so that you can copy the HTML code to a temporary file for safekeeping while you debug this.

Then, there appears to be a huge amount of whitespace at the end of the note, and it seems not to be formatted properly. Did you paste this content in from somewhere? If possible, you should delete all the whitespace at the end.

dstillman

Actually, it probably won't show up as whitespace, so ignore that. Basically, the note sections somehow became extremely nested in the HTML (perhaps from some way that you pasted content into the note?), and that's causing some weirdness. I'm not sure how that resulted in the empty note, which obviously shouldn't be something that can happen easily, but I'm guessing the weird HTML code combined with some action you took resulted in the note being blanked out. (If you can reproduce it, we'd certainly want to know.)

I'm not sure if there's a good way to undo the formatting at this point (while keeping the rich text, at least), but given the state of this note it's probably a good idea to break out additional entries into separate child notes to avoid further problems.

shos6913

Dear Dstillman, Thanks for all your help.
Yes I was cutting and pasting from a PDF document for three days on that same note - so perhaps there was something in the PDF that I pasted in that produced the error. I have now saved the note in textedit as backup - and will cut the note up into smaller sections.
I will report here, if it happens again. Just to reiterate: I noticed that there was a probloem because everything I was bodling was dissappearing.

dstillman

OK, yeah, copying from the PDF is definitely what caused this. When doing that, what may be helpful is using Cmd-Option-Shift-v, which is a Mac shortcut to paste without formatting, instead of Cmd-v. That should avoid the weird HTML code that this has been generating for you.

And yes, I can reproduce what you described, where making a paragraph bold in a note that's formatted like this blanks it out. The content is actually still there (you can see it in the Source Code view), but it ends up disappearing. If that happens, you can press Cmd-Z to undo it and make the paragraph visible again.

If you have further trouble with this note, we can probably figure out a way for you to get it into a better state, but if you paste new text without formatting you should be better off.

In a future version, we might be able to offer a paste without formatting as an option in the Edit menu and note right-click menu to make it easier to avoid these sorts of problems. (An updated version of our third-party note editor might also handle this better.)

shos6913

Ok. Great.
And just for your information, I just reproduced the entire disappearance again (having backed up the text elsewhere).
Leaving the note as it is, first I tried to bold the last two lines, which caused them to disappear. Then I pressed cmd-Z and all the text disappeared.

re cutting and pasting from PDF - I was pasting and then using the function in the zotero editor to "clear formatting," but will try and paste without formatting from now on.

Final Q: What is the name of the text editor in Zotero? and is it possible to download its update from somewhere?

dstillman

It's TinyMCE (used in WordPress, among other places). You can't update it in Zotero yourself (easily), but you can see if you can reproduce the problem in the demos on their site.

shos6913

Great. Thanks again.

dstillman

Yeah, I think there are two separate problems here that are interacting in an unfortunate manner — the visual blanking that TinyMCE is doing given this formatting, and our undo not working properly in some situations. We'll investigate both problems.

dstillman

Unfortunately it looks like the blanking of bolded text does happen with the version on the TinyMCE website when presented with similar HTML. But we can improve our undo, to start.