So disheartened

taylorspencephd
Zotero does not work like it used to. I have posted here several times, because it's now making my word crash regularly. It will not update citations. It is so finicky, I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to finesse One update. This is wrong. I have wrapped my entire career up in this program and it has not worked since you changed it. Since you transferred it from the internet to stand alone, it has not worked properly. And I'm really tired of it.
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  • adamsmith
    I'm sorry you're frustrated but the only way to make it better is to report errors precisely and in detail and, most importantly, follow up on them. E.g. in your last thread, you were pointed at a different thread where developers were working hard to address the issue and were asking for specific feedback, but you never followed up there. That was four months ago and you haven't posted since -- no one even knew you were still having any issues.

    As we have mentioned before, these aren't problems that affect a very large number of Zotero users, and developers, while they have fixed a number of issues since December, have been having a hard time reproducing some the errors, so if those that are affected don't help troubleshoot, I'm afraid there's just no way this is going to improve.
  • taylorspencephd
    Okay, that's fair. But just because I didn't respond to that previous thread, did not mean that I did not try to take the advice of that thread to fix my problem. I did. But the proposed solution was that I go through the document note by note, copying and pasting sections between notes to find where the air was. I'm looking at a manuscript of more than a hundred thousand words. That simply isn't feasible.

    I am revising a manuscript which has zotero citations from as far back as 2008. Perhaps the reason that I'm having so many issues is because I've been working on the same book for so long. It's a big book. With a lot of evidence, and therefore an enormous number of citations. The issue has something to do with older versions of chapters where I have zotero citations, and then combining those older versions with newer documents. When I copy and paste sections into the new it usually crashes my word and I lose my work, or I get this error message

    This.registry.citationreg.citationByld [c[9]] is undefined

    In order for it not to crash, and I'm not saying it's not going to again, I had to shut down zotero, shut down Firefox, delete the old citations, then close the word document, reopen the document reopen everything else, and redo the citations one at a time. In some cases it took up to 5 minutes to update the citations and a 40-page document. All of that took me about 45 minutes and I had managed to put three citations in two paragraphs. At this rate I will never get this book done. Even then, when I had three different word documents open and I tried to insert a new citation, it crashed my word again and I lost all of my work. I think you can understand why I am so frustrated.
  • taylorspencephd
    It just crashed again, and I lost another paragraph of new writing that I will have to recreate. I'm about to give up.
  • dstillman
    But the proposed solution was that I go through the document note by note, copying and pasting sections between notes to find where the air was.
    If you're referring to the Debugging Broken Documents steps, note that it certainly doesn't say to go note by note to find the error. It's instructing you how to do a binary search, so you're cutting the document in halves, which should only require a small number of steps even for a very large document.

    If you're working in a large document, I'd recommend using the new deferred-citation-updates feature by disabling "Automatically update citations" in the Zotero plugin's document preferences. You then won't need to wait for Zotero to update existing citations while you work and can do a single update at the end. (Obviously, since this is such a large document, you'll want to make sure you do that with time for troubleshooting if necessary.)
  • adamsmith
    But the proposed solution was that I go through the document note by note, copying and pasting sections between notes to find where the air was. I'm looking at a manuscript of more than a hundred thousand words. That simply isn't feasible.
    To be clear that wasn't the proposed solution. The idea is to split the document in half and figure out in which half the problematic section/citation is and then narrow it down further, again splitting in half. Even in a document with 1000 citations, you can do this in ten splits (2 to the 10th = 1024)
    The issue has something to do with older versions of chapters where I have zotero citations, and then combining those older versions with newer documents. When I copy and paste sections into the new it usually crashes my word and I lose my work, or I get this error message
    So this sounds promising in that it narrows things down.
    Let's start by making sure that you're on the most recent Zotero and Word version, could you let us know what those respective versions are.

    (Also, the only thing left of Zotero in Firefox is the connector which has nothing to do with citing, so you can leave out Firefox from any troubleshooting that you're doing).

    The next thing is that Zotero since version 5.0.36 has an option to not live update citations every time you insert them, which would seem to save you a lot of time. It's described here: https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-5-0-36/
  • fbennett
    @taylorspencephd Just a note to say don't be disheartened. The deep changes in word processor integration address the progressively longer delays in citation insert and editing that have long been a problem in large, heavily cited projects. Smooth word processor integration is a hard, complex task, and some bugs will inevitably emerge after release, despite intensive pre-release testing.

    You can be confident that the new integration methods will be as strong and stable as the last - I certainly am, and I depend on Zotero in multiple supervision and support responsibilities, including several PhD theses.

    Your errors are of keen interest to the developers. If you can begin by checking your installed version of Zotero to be sure it is the latest, and then repeat steps to cause a crash, they can help.

    If you can reproduce the crash with the latest version, and go through the test-by-halves steps that Dan linked to above to identify the smallest part of the document that fails, it will be very helpful to all users.

    If your Zotero needed an update, and updating it made the problem go away, please let us know. That would be very useful information.

    If repeating the same exact edit operations on the same document sometimes throws an error and sometimes doesn't, that is also useful information.

    Hang in there, and thank you for your patience.
  • taylorspencephd
    Hi, Thanks for your help. I appreciate it. I have downloaded the newest version of zotero -- I did not have the newest version. I think I have the newest Word plugin, but I am running Office 2013. Does that matter?

    I have checked the box under document preferences so that my document will not update citations.

    And so now I will see if it crashes again.

    I did post the error message above that I received.

  • fbennett
    edited April 16, 2018
    Well done. If you have further problems, do post back.

    In the error message you quote above, the text would have been this:

    this.registry.citationreg.citationByld[c[0]] is undefined

    That is, lowercase this, and 0 rather than 9. It's best to use copy-paste to report error messages—it's just a machine, and specifics that don't look meaningful on the surface can be significant.
  • adamsmith
    And Word 2013 shouldn't make a difference, no.
  • taylorspencephd
    I would have used copy and paste, but the dialog box would not let me use it.

    So today, it did not crash, but now it is putting a dashed underline under the entire footnote citation. I have a photo but do not see a way to attach a photo here.
  • bwiernik
    That underlining indicates that the citation isn't being automatically updated:
    https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-5-0-36/#faster-citing-in-large-documents

    You can re-enable automatic citations in the Document Preferences.
  • taylorspencephd
    Okay. Thanks!

    When I do that at the end it begins to update, should I expect it to crash, based on what has gone on before? And will that be the time that I should go through the debugging procedures?
  • adamsmith
    I wouldn't say "expect" but if it'll crash that is when, so you should probably _not_ wait until the end.
    What I'd recommend instead is, as you close down for the day, to save a copy of the document and then hit the "Refresh" button and let Zotero do its thing over night. The first refresh in a large document can take very long (as in 1h+).

    If that works, it's not very likely to crash in the future. If it doesn't, that'd be a good time to run through the debug.
  • taylorspencephd
    Hi, it just crashed my word about 6 times in row. I reported the errors at 452253530

    I have it set to not update, but it still crashed. Luckily this time I did not lose work.
  • taylorspencephd
    [JavaScript Error: "Overwriting translator with same filename 'Crossref.js'" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/translation/translators.js" line: 517}]
    Zotero.Translators resource://zotero/bluebird/util.js:16:16
    module.exports/PromiseSpawn.prototype._promiseFulfilled@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/generators.js:97:18
    module.exports/Promise.prototype._settlePromise@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/promise.js:574:17
    module.exports/Promise.prototype._settlePromise0@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/promise.js:614:5
    module.exports/Promise.prototype._settlePromises@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/promise.js:693:13
    Async.prototype._drainQueue@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/async.js:133:13
    Async.prototype._drainQueues@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/async.js:143:5
    Async/this.drainQueues@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://zotero/bluebird/async.js:17:9


    [JavaScript Error: "NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE: Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXPCComponents_Utils.import]" {file: "resource://services-common/kinto-http-client.js" line: 61}]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.
    [getNoteIndex:field.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.
    [cleanup:document.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.
    [cleanup:document.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.
    [setProperty:document.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.
    [getNoteIndex:field.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.
    [cleanup:document.cpp]"]

    version => 5.0.45, platform => Win32, oscpu => Windows NT 6.1; WOW64, locale => en-US, appName => Zotero, appVersion => 5.0.45, extensions => Zotero LibreOffice Integration (5.0.13.SA.5.0.45, extension), Zotero Word for Windows Integration (5.0.8.SA.5.0.45, extension), Shockwave Flash (29.0.0.113, plugin)
  • adomasven
    edited April 23, 2018
    Could you:
    1. Click on Start
    2. Type Event Viewer.
    3. Run Event Viewer
    5. In Windows Logs -> Applications find a few (at least 2) of these Word crash logs
    6. Copy the information from the General pane for these events and send it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?
  • taylorspencephd
    4/21/18 at 9:57 PM

    Log Name: Application
    Source: Application Error
    Date: 4/21/2018 9:57:33 PM
    Event ID: 1000
    Task Category: (100)
    Level: Error
    Keywords: Classic
    User: N/A
    Computer: preferredcustom
    Description:
    Faulting application name: WINWORD.EXE, version: 15.0.4997.1000, time stamp: 0x5a2f81cc
    Faulting module name: wwlib.dll, version: 15.0.5007.1000, time stamp: 0x5a5eb720
    Exception code: 0xc0000005
    Fault offset: 0x0027940f
    Faulting process id: 0x11c4
    Faulting application start time: 0x01d3d9ed8e59e13e
    Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    Report Id: 48d58462-45e1-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86
    Event Xml:



    1000
    2
    100
    0x80000000000000

    5282
    Application
    preferredcustom



    WINWORD.EXE
    15.0.4997.1000
    5a2f81cc
    wwlib.dll
    15.0.5007.1000
    5a5eb720
    c0000005
    0027940f
    11c4
    01d3d9ed8e59e13e
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    48d58462-45e1-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86




    4/21/18 at 9:53 PM

    Log Name: Application
    Source: Application Error
    Date: 4/21/2018 9:53:52 PM
    Event ID: 1000
    Task Category: (100)
    Level: Error
    Keywords: Classic
    User: N/A
    Computer: preferredcustom
    Description:
    Faulting application name: WINWORD.EXE, version: 15.0.4997.1000, time stamp: 0x5a2f81cc
    Faulting module name: wwlib.dll, version: 15.0.5007.1000, time stamp: 0x5a5eb720
    Exception code: 0xc0000005
    Fault offset: 0x0027940f
    Faulting process id: 0x7ec
    Faulting application start time: 0x01d3d9ed5f7acecf
    Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    Report Id: c4cf4075-45e0-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86
    Event Xml:



    1000
    2
    100
    0x80000000000000

    5279
    Application
    preferredcustom



    WINWORD.EXE
    15.0.4997.1000
    5a2f81cc
    wwlib.dll
    15.0.5007.1000
    5a5eb720
    c0000005
    0027940f
    7ec
    01d3d9ed5f7acecf
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    c4cf4075-45e0-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86





    4/21/18 at 9:52 PM

    Log Name: Application
    Source: Application Error
    Date: 4/21/2018 9:52:37 PM
    Event ID: 1000
    Task Category: (100)
    Level: Error
    Keywords: Classic
    User: N/A
    Computer: preferredcustom
    Description:
    Faulting application name: WINWORD.EXE, version: 15.0.4997.1000, time stamp: 0x5a2f81cc
    Faulting module name: wwlib.dll, version: 15.0.5007.1000, time stamp: 0x5a5eb720
    Exception code: 0xc0000005
    Fault offset: 0x0027940f
    Faulting process id: 0x1850
    Faulting application start time: 0x01d3d65337d3a8e7
    Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    Report Id: 986aa41f-45e0-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86
    Event Xml:



    1000
    2
    100
    0x80000000000000

    5273
    Application
    preferredcustom



    WINWORD.EXE
    15.0.4997.1000
    5a2f81cc
    wwlib.dll
    15.0.5007.1000
    5a5eb720
    c0000005
    0027940f
    1850
    01d3d65337d3a8e7
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    986aa41f-45e0-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86



    Faulting application name: WINWORD.EXE, version: 15.0.4997.1000, time stamp: 0x5a2f81cc
    Faulting module name: wwlib.dll, version: 15.0.5007.1000, time stamp: 0x5a5eb720
    Exception code: 0xc0000005
    Fault offset: 0x0027940f
    Faulting process id: 0x1850
    Faulting application start time: 0x01d3d65337d3a8e7
    Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\WINWORD.EXE
    Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Root\Office15\wwlib.dll
    Report Id: 986aa41f-45e0-11e8-9c37-5cff35059c86

  • noksagt
    Dont know if this is the issue, but you're ruining a version of word 2013 where people have reported crashing not related to zotero. You might try the April 2018 update
  • taylorspencephd
    Thanks! I went back and downloaded all of those updates from 2018, but each time I got the message that they did not apply to any program on my system, so I assume that means that I already downloaded them? I bought this MS Office 2013 in Australia, could that be the problem?
  • noksagt
    The latest Office 2013 Version is 15.0.5023.1000.

    The (different?!) versions of wwlib.dll & winword.exe in your crash log are both lower than that number. Not sure what MS's update schedule is for international versions. Have you run any updater they provide?
  • taylorspencephd
    Thanks so much! I had not thought of a separate update for international versions. I will check now.
  • taylorspencephd
    I now have the newest version of Office 2013. Thanks for catching that. We will see what happens now....
  • taylorspencephd
    edited June 21, 2018
    Hi Guys,

    It took me 15 minutes to put one footnote in my book this AM. I have copied the error reporting below.

    I know you love this program, and I love this program. I am so thankful for your help and support. However, since you changed it, I guess converted it to stand alone, it just has not worked! I used it through my entire dissertation and it NEVER crashed one time. Now it crashed 5 or 6 times for one footnote -- I forget how many times.

    Anyway, I will not give up and try to look into the comment above.

    FYI, I THINK it crashes for me when I have multiple docs opened, an outline and my chapter for example.

    Taylor


    [unrelated errors removed — D.S.]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.

    [getNoteIndex:field.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "The RPC server is unavailable.

    [cleanup:document.cpp]"]

    [JavaScript Error: "Win error 3 during operation open (The system cannot find the path specified.

    )" {file: "(unknown module)" line: 0}]

    version => 5.0.51, platform => Win32, oscpu => Windows NT 6.1; WOW64, locale => en-US, appName => Zotero, appVersion => 5.0.51, extensions => Zotero LibreOffice Integration (5.0.14.SA.5.0.51, extension), Zotero Word for Windows Integration (5.0.8.SA.5.0.51, extension), Shockwave Flash (30.0.0.113, plugin)
  • dstillman
    edited June 21, 2018
    @taylorspencephd: For anything performance related we need a Debug ID that covers it, not a Report ID (and we just need IDs here, not the output itself).
  • taylorspencephd
    Okay, thanks dstillman, but now Zotero says there have been no errors since I started zotero. I had shut it down. Do you have all you need to see what is wrong?
  • dstillman
    edited June 21, 2018
    @adomasven would be the one to answer that, but I'm not clear on what the problem is you're reporting at this point. If you're saying something is slow, we need a Debug ID for an operation that's slow. If it's actually crashing — that is, either Word or Zotero is shutting down with an error — that's a different problem.
  • taylorspencephd
    I explain it above, but Word has crashed repeatedly, and continues to do so.

  • bwiernik
    You really haven’t provided much detail. Exactly what were you doing when you encountered an error and what exactly happened?
  • taylorspencephd
    *Sigh*

    Read the thread! It is the same problem as it ever was. I have spent many, many HOURS trying to resolve this problem. I really have no hope that it will get fixed. But I am posting in the spirit of public service.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Dr. Spence:

    I'm sorry to butt into this thread however I've been following this issue out of my own curiosity.

    You have reported a problem but your reports have not provided the specific information requested by the developers. Until you provide that information -- including a Debug ID -- those who are trying to help cannot provide useful guidance. You have made your annoyance and frustration public but only to postpone a resolution of the issue. Please step back and channel your energy into an orderly give and take discussion with the program developers.
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