Turn off 'instant formatting' (feature copy from EndNote CWYW)

markt
I am working on a thesis with about 700 active sources in Word 2013 drawing from a Zotero standalone library of 1200 sources. This results in a very slow citation adding process. The green bar appears for over 2 mins and really slows down my workflow.

I have reviewed some of the tips for improving performance and switched from the Firefox plugin to Standalone but this is what it typically takes me to insert a citation (timed with a stopwatch 3 times and averaged):
13 seconds for the red bar to pop up
2 seconds for the citation to show up after typing 3 letters
2 mins, 13 seconds to add the single citation to the doc

Believe it or not I got worse numbers in Endnote 6 and Endnote 7. Still, in Endnote, CWYW has an option to turn off 'instant formatting'. Endnote just inserts the field codes then you update them periodically (and when adding page numbers or changing a citation but you can also do this manually if you know the field codes).

It would be great to have similar functionality in Zotero or some more tips to help me reduce the average of 2 and half minutes to something much more bearable.
  • fbennett
    The ODF/RTF Scan plugin might be what you are looking for.
  • adamsmith
    although that's rather imperfect with Word and it doesn't have something like the quick format bar, so you need to leave Word and switch to Zotero every time you want to add a citation.
    I do agree that this comes up often enough for longer works that it's worth thinking about.
  • markt
    Thanks for the ODT solution. When I convert the docx to ODT a lot of things break and like Adam says, it's a bit clumsy switching back and forth.

    For a completely new paper I might start in ODT but for my thesis I might just have to work around the lag by trying to write or read while I wait for the progress bar.

    Thanks for your help fbennett and adamsmith
  • mlwang
    I don't think the zotero library size is a big issue. Seasoned zotero users may have more. A word document with more than 700 footnotes with field codes (in Word linguo), on the other hand, is a big problem.

    I'm new to zotero and have only a few dozen records in my library. Created a document with 700+ cites (it's just a paragraph with 15 cites duplicated 50 times) just now and indeed trying into insert a new citation was a pain.

    That's not really surprising. Back in the days, you don't need 700 footnotes, just put a couple hundreds of pages into a document is enough to slow Word down to a crawl.

    So an old trick from the old days might worth a try: divide and conquer. Divide your thesis into chapters (or smaller if some chapters are big), and the performance should improve significantly. Just merge them at the end and let zotero refresh. Switching to the draft view (instead of page view) where footnotes are hidden will also speed up VBA performance, especially when zotero is refreshing.
  • adamsmith
    correct, this has almost no relation to the size of the library (and 1200 is quite small anyway). It's the number of citations in the document that matter (also, the Word processor. Word for Mac is much slower for this than anything else).
    I agree that authoring in chapters is the way to go, but there certainly are legitimate use-cases for working with a long document (e.g. for final editing) and even if there weren't, telling people they're doing writing the wrong way isn't terribly effective ;). If we could figure out a way to make working on long documents non-infuriating-slow that'd be great.
  • markt
    Thanks Adam, my thoughts entirely. Chapter-by-chapter is what EndNote Support told me when I used that system but it was just as unsatisfying then as it is now.
  • markt
    Actually, looking at my 7 chapter files now, it's not so bad. It chunks the task down and makes the thesis seem more manageable! Hopefully next year though when I bring everything back together you coders can craft a brilliant solution to address this.
  • Stinus
    EndNote has the option of viewing unformatted citations which removes the field codes, something like the ODF/RTF solution I guess (???), but working directly from the instant citation plugin for Word. This completely solves the speed problem in long documents!
    I don't have the faintest clue about the technical side of this, but I really wish this would become a feature in Zotero for Word.
  • fbennett
    Please don't post the same message to multiple threads. It just spreads the discussion out, making it harder to follow when people come back to the subject at a later time.

    Everyone involved in Zotero development is aware of the speed issue, and of static cites as a solution. It's worth requesting the feature, but the devs read all of the forum messages, so nothing is gained by posting repeatedly, and it lessens the impact.
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