Tag Selector not working

maddi
The tag selector panel doesn't work on my laptop, but is working on my desktop. Both are running Windows XP but I have more Firefox extensions on my laptop than my desktop. I'm assuming that it might be a conflict between Z and one or more the extensions - but which one?

If anyone has had a similar problem and has information that will save me from uninstalling and reinstalling extensions one at a time that would be great.

Or maybe it is something else causing the problem?

BTW: Great program. I've been waiting years for someone to design a research tool that handles note taking this well.

PS - I'm using the beta 3 version with latest updates.

Thanks
  • dstillman
    Can you give us any more details? In what way(s) is it not working?

    If you follow the steps in the Advanced Instructions section of the Reporting Bugs page, do any errors show up in the error console?
  • cartesian
    I just imported a fairly large EndNote library which brought with it lots of automatic tags including a number of long ones (please provide an option to turn these off!), and my tag selector wouldn't show all my tags any more until deleted all these automatic ones. I'd get a horizontal scrollbar on the tag selector, but (even when I selected "My Library" and "Display all Tags"), I'd only be able to see one tag at a time; I couldn't scroll through my tag collection. I'm on XP.
  • dstillman
    We've already added an option to turn off automatic tags on the development branch--it'll appear in the next release.

    I'm not totally clear on the issue you're describing. Can you send a screenshot to support@zo...org? Thanks.
  • cartesian
    On more investigation, the problem is simply having any tags that are very long. I just make a really long tag for one of my library items, and it causes the horizontal scrollbar to appear in the tag selector. But that makes the vertical scrollbar disappear, so that I can no longer access some of my tags in the selector.
  • dstillman
    And expanding the tag selector by dragging up the splitter above it doesn't bring the vertical scrollbar into view?
  • cartesian
    It does Dan, thanks. But that's really hard to figure out - I had to drag first my main window divider, then the tag selector divider, to get the vertical scrollbar to show. Adding to this is the complication, for the user who hasn't yet found the vertical scrollbar, that it's not at all obvious what the horizontal scrollbar is for if you happen to have one or two of your short tags stuck in view. It looks like a bug.

    A bit of redesign there might be in order here, no? How about making the bottom 3 lines of the tag selector (from "Display all tags" down) fit into 2, and then fixing enough height for the scrollbar?
  • dstillman
    There'll likely be additional UI elements on the "Display all tags" line, so shrinking it to two lines probably isn't an option. (We did try quite a few permutations, though.) The other issue is that "Display all tags" doesn't really make logical sense below the Filter field, as "Display all tags" determines the total set of tags to display, and then the Filter field filters that.

    We could, however, have the tag selector default to displaying three lines of tags instead of two, which would probably give enough room to prevent the vertical scrollbar from disappearing. (Two is the minimum height, but it's not really ideal for use that way.) Alternatively (or in addition), we could just prevent the horizontal scrollbar from displaying altogether, since it pretty much only happens for automatic tags, and those are generally messy and should be renamed anyway...
  • cartesian
    Yes, I'd personally prefer the second option of preventing the horizontal scroll appearing, as the Zotero window already takes up, in my view, too much of my browser screen at its minimum if the tag selector is open. You could allow for users to view longer tags by allowing the vertical splitter to the right of the tag selector to be dragged further right.

    One suggestion I have to create a bit more vertical space flexibility would be to reduce the min. vertical of the Collections window and remove the column heading "Collections" which is rather unnecessary.

    On an unrelated topic, shouldn't there be a "?" button for help - even if all it does is load the documentation page?
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