Can't generate bibliography in MacWord

robinwyatt
Hi all,

I have just finished writing my paper, which must be submitted today. I have a lot riding on this. And I simply cannot get Zotero to generate a bibliography. I've tried everything I can think of.

I have Zotero 1.5b1, Office 2008 for Mac, Firefox 3.0.7 and OS X 10.5.6.

The error message I get is as follows:

File "/System/Library/Frameworks/
Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xml/
sax/expatreader.py", line 217, in close
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/
Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xml/
sax/expatreader.py", line 211, in feed
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/
Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xml/
sax/handler.py", line 38, in fatalError
SAXParseException: :153:489: no
element found

Thanks so much in advance - I'll be so grateful! Oh, and please keep any replies as idiot friendly as possible. I'm not too wise about these things! :-)

Cheers,

Robin
  • dstillman
    Restart Firefox, attempt to insert a bibliography, and then, back in Firefox, go to Report Errors under the gear menu and paste in here any errors you find in the report.

    You may be able to fix this yourself using the steps described in Debugging Broken Documents.
  • robinwyatt
    edited March 16, 2009
    Thanks, Dan - here you are. But they all seem to be something to do with Google...

    [error output removed - DS]
  • dstillman
    OK, those aren't related to Zotero. I'd recommend following the Debugging Broken Documents steps.
  • robinwyatt
    Alright, that's what I'm doing, as it happens. Loads of my citations seem to be problematic. Could there be a reason for this? I would like to be able to avoid this in future.
  • dstillman
    What makes you say that many citations are problematic?
  • robinwyatt
    As in, trying to edit them results in an error message. In a 20-page document, I'd say about a quarter of them gave that problem. I checked them all, one by one.
  • dstillman
    Were you copying each individual citation into a new document or just trying to edit them in place in the original document?
  • robinwyatt
    You mean during the debugging exercise? As the submission of my paper was urgent, I copied the whole text into a new MacWord document, deleted all my text, leaving only the citations. Then I tested each one and re-made the ones that didn't work. Once the whole thing worked, I generated the bibliography and cut and pasted it into my paper.

    (Actually, to be precise, I never managed to get it to work in one long line of references. I split it into two halves and generated two bibliographies from the two halves and combined them. I don't know why it worked in two halves but not in the one whole!)

    Of course, I would not like to have to do this in future. But I do want to stick with Zotero as most other things about it are far easier to use than EndNote.

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