Zotero Standalone with MS Word 2008 for Mac is very slow

MKalli84
I'm using Zotero Standalone alpha with Word 2008 for Mac (12.3.0) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8).

In the past, I've successfully used it to write a couple of papers (with >100 references) and never experienced any problems. It's just a great product!

Now I'm writing up my thesis (at the moment 106 references) and Zotero is getting slower and slower. I've arrived at a point where it has become almost unusable. It takes a minute until the window pops up from where I can select a new citation. When inserting it, it needs 10 minutes until the new reference appears in the document. During that time, Zotero doesn't respond but I can still write in Word.

In Word, several messages pop up telling me that Word is converting tmpWpJzgH.rft

The error report ID is 1567671852.

In hope for help...
Kalli
  • ajlyon
    There have been several improvements to the Word integration for Mac and Windows that haven't been released for Standalone yet. Try using Zotero-in-Firefox for now, with the latest Word plugin. To maintain much of the standalone experience, you can set a preference to let Zotero still talk to Chrome/Safari: http://ideophone.org/zotero-for-chrome-and-safari/
  • MKalli84
    I've tried it with Firefox 5.0.1 and Zotero 2.1.8 but I still have the same problems.
  • hubermic
    Same here - writing my thesis with actually more than 100 references. Zotero is getting slower and slower. I tried the Firefox extension as well as the standalone version (acutally 3.0b2.1) on my mac with word 2011. Both take about 1-2 minutes to open up the reference window when inserting an new reference. This is quite annoying - I don't want to change my reference manager but working with these delays is really hard. During the 1-2 minute delay, the word process takes all the cpu power, not the zotero process... Any ideas on this? I would appreciate any help...
  • dstillman
    Both take about 1-2 minutes to open up the reference window when inserting an new reference.
    This is to open the new red interface, or the older window interface?
  • hubermic
    Hi Dan, does not make any difference - I prefer the older interface but the new one has the same delay. Tried it again with the standalone version as well as the extension.
  • Kalli84
    I could solve the problem by changing the output style (SMALL instead of Angewandte Chemie, both look almost the same).
  • hubermic
    Thank you kalli84, I tried it with several standard Styles and a self written one. Makes no difference...
  • hubermic
    Some more information I gathered during the last days:

    The slow respond time affects the actual zotero beta releases and the standalone version as well as the current stable version.
    Due to a strange effect where captions of images / tables and zotero citations suddenly got mixed up I had to rebuilt my thesis from scratch concerning the citations (took me a whole day). After doing that, now zotero responds slightly faster. Now it's about 10 to 20 seconds until the citation window pops up. Still interrupts my workflow, but I can somehow live with it.

    Furthermore, I recently did some "round-trip-engineering" writing on the same Word document using Mac OS X as well als a Windows 7 system (consistency works like a charm due to zoteros syncing capabilities). Using Windows, there is absolutely no delay between the command and the zotero citation window opening up. This obviously and unfortunately affects only Mac OS / MS Office for Mac.
  • hubermic
    edited September 15, 2011
    Browsing the Zotero forum, I found another thread (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5728/wors-2008-puglin-slowunuseable-in-large-documents) where Zotero developer Simon said the issue is related to the Word API which on Mac OS is based on Apple Script and therefore obviously is slow. He furthermore announced they were thinking about a way to store references in word documents using an alternative way which could eventually solve the slowness problem related to MS Word on Mac.

    I have seen that in the latest beta release, a way is offered to store citations directly into Word documents. Is this what Simon was talking about? I tried this feature once but as far as I remember it made no difference concerning the delay.
  • Simon
    edited September 15, 2011
    In some future version of Zotero (maybe 3.0b3, maybe not until 3.1 or whatever comes next, depending on how stable it proves to be), the add citation dialog will appear immediately and perform the time-consuming parts in the background while you make a selection. (I have already implemented this, but whether it is stable enough for use remains to be seen.) I think I can speed things up even further in the future. But I don't think we're doing the format-at-end approach to references because it's too much work for something that only affects Word for Mac, and I think we can get almost the same performance without it.
  • hubermic
    Simon, thank you very much for your response and these good news concerning the performance issue. I'm looking forward to the next beta release. Keep up your great work!
  • sa_ge
    Hi Simon, do you already know when you will be able to release the mentioned changes to speed up things a bit? Zotero really is great and I enjoy using it! But responding times are too long to work efficiently and I would hate to change my reference manager...
  • ajlyon
    Have you tried the 3.0 beta? It includes a pretty thorough-going overhaul of the citation insertion mechanism, possibly including the changes Simon refers to.
  • sa_ge
    Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm using Zotero 3.02b and Zotero Word for Mac Integration 3.1.9 with Word 2011 and experiencing long response times
  • adamsmith
    yeah - Simon's comment was written after the 3.02b release, so I take it the code he mentioned isn't included in the current beta.
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