Problem changing footnotes to endnotes

Gogol1967
Hi Everybody,

I'm encountering this really annoying problem. I'm trying to convert the footnotes in my manuscript into endnotes, as required by a publisher. However, every time I try and do that, with any one of the chapters of my manuscript I get the same error message "Object has been deleted. [convertToNoteType: field.cpp]". The same happens when I try to convert endnotes to footnotes (I tried, just to check). The first three footnotes get moved, the rest remain in their place. Trying to repeat the action does not produce the same error message, but doesn't change the location of the footnotes either.

I saw that other users previously encountered similar problems but were able to solve the problem by converting the Word document preferences in the footnotes section of the references tab and updating the "Location" to endnotes. However, in my case. Even when I try that solution, this doesn't work either...
(here previous users who encountered similar problems:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/63823/error-message-when-converting-footnotes-to-endnotes
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22489/error-converting-footnotes-to-endnotes)

I'm using Zotero 5.0.17 with Word 2007 on a new Windows 10 machine. Recently switched from Zotero Firefox Connector to Zotero Standalone.

I really would really appreciate your help. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of notes and I'm due to submit in the next two days...




  • adamsmith
    I'm afraid you'll likely have to run through
    https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
    this does seem, given the error, like a stray, not fully deleted citation field code
  • Gogol1967
    Thanks,

    Still, I wonder why you think that my problem is a broken document, since I also don't understand the concept. What caused the document to be broken.
    The same thing happens with older documents which I've used in the past and didn't cause any problem (though it does not happen when I start a new document and add a few random refs).

    I've tried a number of the suggestions in the link you added
    1. Track changes is turned off
    2. I'm not sure what "Check for citations in image captions" means. How do I do that?
    3. tried that. Didn't work
    4-6. tried that. didn't work either
    7. I tried that. Interestingly, I opened the report error, saw a bunch of stuff there. Added a new reference - but then when i tried to open it again zotero got stuck and refused to show it (it's not showing now).
    8. This didn't work either. Both halves of the document produced the same problem. Also, I don't see why this would be related to specific citation since it happens with every one of the specific chapter of the book - each of which has different citations.

    What do you suggest I do?
  • Gogol1967
    Here's my report Id: 1517781851

    Don't know if that's helpful but these are last couple lines that appear in it:
    [JavaScript Error: "Upload request 1/VU6E9A8S failed"]

    [JavaScript Error: "You have reached your Zotero File Storage quota. Some files were not uploaded. Other Zotero data will continue to sync to the server.

    See your zotero.org account settings for additional storage options.

    abstract.html (149KB)"]

    [JavaScript Error: "Object has been deleted. [convertToNoteType:field.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "Object has been deleted. [convertToNoteType:field.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "IndexedDB Maintenance finished with error: NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE: ActorsParent.cpp:18869"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The connection to wss://stream.zotero.org/ has terminated unexpectedly. Some data may have been transferred."]

    [JavaScript Error: "WebSocket connection closed: 1006 "]

    version => 5.0.17, platform => Win32, oscpu => Windows NT 10.0; WOW64, locale => en-US, appName => Zotero, appVersion => 5.0.17, extensions => Zotero LibreOffice Integration (5.0.6.SA.5.0.17, extension), Zotero Word for Windows Integration (5.0.2.SA.5.0.17, extension)
  • adomasven
    edited August 30, 2017
    If you have manually appended or prepended text to Zotero citations in footnotes, then that could be the cause of the problem and if you have done it across the document, then splitting it in half would still produce the error.

    I know this is very annoying, especially if you have many footnotes edited like that, but there are technical reasons why it can't work. The proper way to do footnote citation edits is by using the "prefix" and "suffix" fields in the citation dialog.
  • Gogol1967
    That actually could make sense. I did do that, many times along the way.
    It just seemed a more convenient way to write long notes than in the prefix/suffix fields, which display only a couple of words at a time, not big enough to comfotably edit whole paragraphs (how are you supposed to that???)
    Interestingly it didn't seem to pose any problem as long as I was using Zotero as a Firefox add-on.
    I'll try to change that and update whether this helped. Thanks!
  • adomasven
    It just seemed a more convenient way to write long notes than in the prefix/suffix fields, which display only a couple of words at a time, not big enough to comfotably edit whole paragraphs (how are you supposed to that???)
    We're working on improving that interface.
  • Gogol1967
    Eventually, I contacted my friend, in my old home (in another country) who had my old computer - and he managed to override the problem using this tip (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22489/error-converting-footnotes-to-endnotes) which didn't work on my new computer with the zotero standalone.

    Problem seems solved, or at least overridden for now. I'll know not to do the same mistake with writing notes outside the zotero interface in my next book project...

    Thank you for all your help, and for all the amazing work.

    Gogol
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