communicating with Zotero [from Word/OO]

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  • dstillman
    alan: Uninstalling and reinstalling the plugin won't affect your existing documents. In fact, uninstalling and reinstalling is the only supported way of upgrading the OO plugin due to apparent bugs in OO's upgrade process.
  • alan
    Uninstalled and reinstalled it.

    Still no joy.

    Have now taken to pulling the information from Zotero across to a neutral doc, resizing it, and sticking it in the footnote. Not ideal, but will get me through my mphil. After that I will give the problem a bit more thought.

    In the meantime, have you any more suggestions as to how i might actually resolve it?
  • anark
    I managed to solve the problem by setting up a new user account on my machine and moving the Zotero database over there; that's on a Linux system, but Windows has been doing user management for a while too.

    If you can wait, there's a replacement for the plugin that should be released any time now.
  • chs200123
    I have been going through these forums now for two days in trying to solve this connection error issue. The same one everyone else is having. I have tried virtually every tutorial that is on this site. Everything works perfectly on my own personal machines, however, when I try and use it on my company machine, I get the connection error issue. I'm running portable firefox, openoffice prerelease 1, and zotero 1.0.7 on firefox and the 1.0b3 zotero extension for openoffice.

    My company lives in the world of total IT lockdown, so running the dubugger from the command line is not possible at all. Is this fixable?
  • passmorer
    "An error occurred communicating with Zotero. Please ensure Firefox is open and try again." is the constant message even after following the troubleshooting steps and advice in these threads still with no difference, completly reinstalled zotero 3 times both on word and on firefox 3.

    Any advice or other suggestions pleeeease!
  • alan
    I have done everything I know how to do, but do not understand how to debug. Anyone care to enlighten me?

    Not that it will actually help....
  • anark
    Zotero Documentation > Debug Output
  • vcina
    Sent in Error report number 724529607. I am having the same problems as everyone else in this thread. Have tried all of the "Fixes" and nothing has worked to this point.
    I am running the latest Zotero version and the latest and greatest version of Firefox as well.
  • dsinicropi
    I tried upgrading to Zotero 1.5 sync 3.2 and using Word Plugin 1.0b4 and, like many others on this thread, I'm getting the message "An error occurred communicating with Zotero. Please ensure Firefox is open and try again." I never got this message with the earlier version of Zotero and the Word plugin (1.0b3). Any new things to try? I really need the 1.5 version for a particular Journal style.
  • ars
    "An error occurred communicating with Zotero. Please ensure Firefox is open and try again." In my case Firefox was in offline mode. After switching to online mode Zotero works well with OO.
  • dstillman
    I've updated the troubleshooting page with some additional details, including a list of information to include in your forum post if you're still having trouble.
  • sammyr
    I'm having the same problem. Word cannot communicate with firefox. I submitted error report 173347419, and am running xp with the latest versions of firefox, zotero, and the plugin. i've done everything the support pages say, and nothing seems to do the trick. please help me. i am at my wits end.
  • pedrobrasil
    Error log 1916408833

    Windows 2000 MSOffice 2000 Firefox 301 zotero 107

    After using a lot of zotero, suddenly I had the very same problem discussed at the early messages. "Can not comunicate with zotero. Make shure Firefox is open". At the time I was insertig citations and using the word review tool simultaneously. I thought that it was some problem with the plugin becase of the word version! Not only the insert citation was not working but also the refresh and all other buttons were not working. But after I read some the messages posted at this forum, in one of them the user deleted the bibliography file in zotero and it seemed to work fine, although the error message appearantly had nothig to do with it!

    So wha what I did was to delete the two bibliography last imported into the library. After that everything worked fine. By coincidence these two bibliography were iported from Google scholar. Later, I found the very same references at PubMed. I did import them and then .... everything still working fine. It seems that some sort of error occurred while importing these last two references from Google Scholar.

    The error message does not point toward the real cause of the error althoug!

    Best regards to all!
  • juacas
    Environment:
    Windows Vista Ultimate
    Word 2007
    Zotero 1.0.9
    plugin zotero 1.0.b3

    Steps to reproduce this error:

    Open Word.
    Create New empty Document.

    Insert a citation. (Citation style Harvard)
    insert a second citation and Word hungs.
    Zotero inserts a new Field on the document "{Citation}" and Word is freezed (bussy cursor icon and unresponsive).

    After clicking on the Cancel Button of the Zotero Window there is a popup windows with "An error occurred communicating with Zotero. Please ensure Firefox is open and try again" message.

    Debug report number: 1851514510

    After changing Citation style to Chicago (without bibliography) insertion of citations turns running.

    After changing to Chicago (with bibliography) insertion and bibliography are broken. Insert citation shows the same error.
    Insert Bibliography shows: Run time Error 9: Subindex out of range.

    Debug report number: 1403888345
  • dstillman
    juacas: Can you start a new thread with this info (since this looks like an actual error in Zotero) and let us know the names of the authors in the first and second citations? Thanks.
  • mrnlegato
    I have been able to reproducibly reproduce this error in Word 2007. (Although I couldn't figure out how to output the debug results)

    I'm using the styles feature on Word, and anytime that I copy-paste a citation from the document into any piece of text that has a "style" heading, caption, etc, the zotero communication with Word will fail. Deleting the citation solves the problem immediately. This applies to any citation pasted.
  • kmarr
    For those who tried to remove the table of contents or index, Zotero sometimes struggles with the references to these; so make sure to show the paragraph marks, and then search for curly brackets and XE=; remove these and Zotero works again.
  • lportier
    I had a very similar problem, the plugin working at first and then suddenly getting a popup error "Can not communicate with zotero. Make sure Firefox is open."

    What happened in between? I had a reconfiguration done of my laptop at my company, where proxy settings were replaced by an automatic configuration script for proxy settings.

    Here is what solved the problem in my case.

    The advice on this page here.
    On Windows XP, open Internet Explorer, go to Tools→Internet Options→Connections→LAN Settings, and disable “Automatically detect settings” and “Use a proxy server for your LAN”. If this fixes the problem, you will need to keep “Automatically detect settings” off and make sure “Bypass proxy server for local addresses” is checked.

    The confusing thing is that Firefox allows similar LAN settings for the proxy and one would expect that settings in Firefox are sufficient, when using zotero, a Firefox add-on. But still, I only managed to make the plugin work again by opening Internet Explorer, which I rarely use, set proxy settings manually and mark the option “Bypass proxy server for local addresses”.

    I hope this is usuful for at least someone coping with the same problem.
  • dstillman
    The confusing thing is that Firefox allows similar LAN settings for the proxy and one would expect that settings in Firefox are sufficient, when using zotero, a Firefox add-on. But still, I only managed to make the plugin work again by opening Internet Explorer, which I rarely use, set proxy settings manually and mark the option “Bypass proxy server for local addresses”.
    Word uses the system proxy settings, which happen to be set within IE.
  • msvarnyk
    same problem - same message when clicking on any zotero button in a new word document.

    Windows XP 2002,
    Firefox 3.0.6.
    Zotero 1.0.9.
    Word 2007
    Zotero-Word-Plugin-Installer-1.0b3

    Uninstalled and reinstalled both Zotero and the Word plug-in, nothing. Tried running the debug, but didn't see any console when started Firefox though the Run function. Tried disabling Firewall, and checked out all other suggested solutions. Nothing.
  • colinb
    I have just installed Zotero + Word plugin and have the same communication problems in word 2007. I opened IE and found I had set IE to work off line changed this setting
    Now works OK with no communication error
  • philgons
    I'm getting the error message "This citation no longer exists in the Zotero database. Delete it?" If I delete it, the problem I'm encountering is that it is very difficult to track down the three citations that are being deleted, so I can replace them or find out what the problem is. It would be great if Zotero told me which citations it was about to delete. Anyone have any tricks for figuring this out?
  • anika
    After a few days of trying to fix the communication problem (Windows XP, Firefox 3.0.7., OO 3.0.1. Zotero 1.0.9, plug-in 1.0b.4), it seems that Zotero doesn't like fields in the text. I ended up deleting all existing citations and footnotes/endnotes before the OO Writer and Zotero could worked together.
    I think the error appeared when I inserted a citation with the "Changes->Record" option on. But of course I read the precaution against it only after the trouble had started. Maybe, it would be possible to warn people about turning the option off somewhere before they need the troubleshooting section...
  • wiwiguedd
    edited April 17, 2009
    -sorry guys...I found the word dot file :)
  • dee2009
    edited April 18, 2009
    Don't know whether this is the right thread to post this to, but when editing references from Word 2007, using the Show Editor button, and then pasting text into the field, Word freezes.

    The only way to shut Word down is to kill the Winword.exe process from the taskbar. Is this worth reporting a bug?

    Using zotero 1.09
  • dstillman
    when editing references from Word 2007, using the Show Editor button, and then pasting text into the field, Word freezes.
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3064/bug-report-openoffice-writer-crash-when-pasting-from-clipboard-into-zotero-interface-search/#Item_15
  • dee2009
    @ Dan Stillman

    thanks
  • jimbotyson
    Hi,

    I have firefox 3.0.7, OpenOffice 2.0, zotero 1.5b2.

    I can't upgrade OpenOffice (I'm on a managed system). I upgraded to the beta because I need syncing so badly. Now, I can't get the OpenOffice plugin required for the beta version to work with OOo 2.0. Is this to be expected? If it comes to it I will consider migrating to Word. Anyone have any ideas?
  • pedrobrasil
    I see that you problem is wiht OO not with zotero itself. Firts recomendation is to ask your system administrator to update the OO for you. If that is not possible, and you are working with windows (does not work with linux) there are some tools in the www available freely to avoid the "forgotten" administrator password problem, such as ophcrack - which retrieves the password, and others to reset the administrator password and other to create a new administrator password. It may not work in all cases though!
    But latter you will have to "forget" the administrator password. ;-)
  • jimbotyson
    LOL

    I'm glad to say (since I work for the Information Systems Division) that our security is rather better than that.

    The fact is that upgrading OO isn't a solution for us right now. I'm happy to migrate to word if I have to, but I was interested to know before I do that, whether anyone *knew* of a problem with the setup as we have it.

    Jim

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