scrolling bar missing?

Hi!
I am not sure if it can be from my system or from Zotero, but I just found that if i open more fields in the central pannel no horizontal scrolling bar appears so i can easily see them. Shouldn't this happen?

Thanks for this great software! :)
  • Hi,
    I have just today installed Firefox 3 and Zotero 1.0.6. (previously running FF 2 x and Zotero 1.0.4)
    Most things appear to work fine, but I have lost the vertical scroll bar on the tag selector window. ("Collections" still has its scroll bar) This is possibly because Zotero now shows all the automatic tags, (big heaps!) but extending the window to its full height and dragging the edge as far to the right as possible to maximize the size, still does not return the visibility of the scroll bar.
    What to do?
  • Most things appear to work fine, but I have lost the vertical scroll bar on the tag selector window
    You'd have to provide a screenshot, though I suspect you could get it to appear with a bit of fiddling of widths and heights. If you have a scroll wheel on your mouse, that should also work. An easier suggestion, if you don't want to see all the automatic tags, is to just turn off the preference in the drop-down menu within the tag selector.
  • Not sure how to send the screenshot?
  • You can post it somewhere and include a link or e-mail it to support@zot....org.
  • I have just sent an email with the screenshot attached.
    I think this might be an issue with some of the auto tags lacking proper separators - there seem to be some groups of imported tags separated by semicolons which are not being read as separate fields. Long fields may be pushing the whole tag selector column so that it and the surrounding tags effectively disappear under the central column.
    I am guessing if I could drag the whole widow to the right I would find the scroll bar again. It certainly reappears when there are only short tags in the window.
    That's my best guess anyway.
    Right now I am doing a labourious manual job of going through every item and checking the length of the tags appended to it, and breaking them up when I find a long one. So far only up to the "K's "
    See what you make of the screenshot.
  • I think this might be an issue with some of the auto tags lacking proper separators - there seem to be some groups of imported tags separated by semicolons which are not being read as separate fields
    Yes, that's likely the problem. If you tell us the site from which those long tags came, we can adjust the translator to separate them automatically in the future.
  • Hmm,
    I just checked each of my 'collections" for tag selector scroll bar problems and they all work except two. Both of these were originally imported from EndNote. (I have retained my imports from EndNote in separate collections. ) Why one of the three imports works and the other two don't would probably require me to recollect what I was doing in early Feb of this year which is when I installed Zotero and added them. Memory does not stretch that far.
    However it could also be a function of slightly different labels in each of the imports. I have noticed in the past that when using the EndNote imports in Zotero some of the fields were a bit odd, probably because I added a couple of extra fields in EndNote and renamed some when I was using it But it must also have something to do with auto tags as this was not a problem in Zotero 1.0.4
    Your turn to guess?
  • Bingo!
    I have gone through both those collections that still caused problems. (That is, those imported from EndNote)
    The scroll bar returned when I got the max number of characters in tag fields (including spaces) under about 110 characters, with the column edge dragged as far as I could to the right, however I can easily replicate the problem by dragging the tag selector column edge to the left, and, as I still have some reasonably long uncorrected fields, (presumably) as soon as it overlaps a tag enough, the scroll bar disappears again!

    Finally here's something you CAN try at home! (though I suggest if you are doing it deliberately you start your long tag with the letter A, so it remains in view)

    It would be nice if there were a proper fix for this as its taken me the best part of a day and a half exclusively working on it, to fix it.
  • I am having similar problems with tags. The box for tags, as you know, has always been located in the bottom left corner of the screen. After I downloaded version 1.0.6 of Zotero, the scrollbar that always appeared at the left-hand side of the tag box suddenly disappeared. Without a scrollbar, it is now impossible for me to view all of my tags beyond the first two or three lines. There is a related problem. Apparently the scrollbar in previous versions was acting as a barrier to the tags, preventing them from spilling past the margins of the tag box. In addition, the tags were displayed or aligned with full justification. Now that the scrollbar has vanished, the tags are extending to an undetermined point several inches past the default left-hand side of the tag box. Even if I pull the barrier between the tag box and the middle column as far as I can to the left, I am unable to reach the far left edge of the left-most tags that are partially displayed in the tag box. It also appears, though I can't be sure, that the full justification in the tag box has been traded in for a flush left, ragged right justification. The reason I think this is happening is because the unequal spacing that used to occur between tags in full justification has now apparently been replaced by equidistant spacing between tags in the tag box. I hope you can bring back the scroll bar, restore the full justification of tags, and keep all of the tags displayed within the left- and right-hand boundaries of the tag box.
  • PhDinHistory: There were no changes to the tag selector UI in 1.0.6. The only difference is that the preference for displaying automatic tags may have gotten reset to true, and you likely have some long automatic tags. We'll try to fix the scrollbar issue, but, in the meantime, turning off Show Automatic in the tag selector menu should hide the automatic tags and return the tag selector to its previous state.
  • edited June 19, 2008
    Or, if you can't see the tag selector menu because it's beyond the right edge, go to about:config in the Firefox address bar, search for extensions.zotero.automaticTags, double-click to set that to false, then open a new Firefox window.
  • Thanks for the tip. I had to use an alternative approach (search for a rare tag that would display on only the first line of the tag box and not spill past the left edge) in order to bring the tag menu back into visibility. But then tag menu gave me the option to turn off automatic tags. I did this and suddenly the scroll bar reappeared. It would be nice to have a way to identify the really long tags so that I could shorten them. I would like to intermingle my automatic tags and user-defined tags without having to give up my scroll bar and tag menu to the invisibility zone.
  • PhDinHistory said
    "It would be nice to have a way to identify the really long tags so that I could shorten them."
    I heartily second that!
    Only after I got the scroll bar back could I go through the tags with any ease to shorten them. Before that I could not see past letter E. Perhaps a separate 'edit ' window as for Notes or similar that displayed each tag on one line would assist. One line to a tag would make picking up problem lengths easy.
  • Only after I got the scroll bar back could I go through the tags with any ease to shorten them.
    Just want to mention again that if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can position the mouse over the list of tags and use the wheel to scroll, even if the scroll bar isn't visible. Most laptops have functionality to simulate a scroll wheel as well (two-finger drag on Macs, dragging along an edge on many PC laptops...).
  • In addition to the Edit window suggested above, breaking up tags on import is the obvious solution, but there might be times when you actually want a longish tag. Allowing the edge of the tag column to kern and /or wrap tags would permit this.
  • Thanks for the substitution method. I think I will try it out while my scroll bar is still AWOL.
  • Thanks for the scroll-wheel tip too.
    I believe there is a sex difference between men (scrollers) and women (non-scrollers) so I tend not to think about the use of the scroll-wheel as an option.
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