(Hidden?) zotero bookmarks in librewriter and custom properties

ilc168
Zotero 5.069 and LibreOffice 6.2.4.2

I write in OpenOffice and my supervisors use word. It appears my documents have "hidden" bookmarks from previously deleted zotero bookmarks. They don't show up in Writer under bookmarks but under file>properties>custom properties in writer there are hundreds of them.

Their extensions/label looks like something like this under: ZOTERO_BREF_2NFQkRjN1HZk_9 or this: ZOTERO_BREF_Lbuqg5U50Xgy_2 my experience with cleaning up writer documents and bookmarks in the past is that these are likely superfolous. The bookmarks that are "healthy" are shown something like this in writer (not in custom properties) ZOTERO_BREF_UVd0TYSkMTu2

Screenshot here https://www.dropbox.com/s/5r40blek14mpreg/ZotWrit troubleshoot.PNG
Any advice as to what's happening here? I don't really understand how custom properties work in zotero and therefore writer but it seems like the cause of the issue in the first place is me inserting, then either deleting the citation later... or inserting, editing the citation directly (either deliberately or inadvertedly) then later deleting.

Note, the superfolous bookmarks also show up in word too under custom properties.

Thanks for any advice.
  • adomasven
    This is how bookmark encoding in Word works. If you want to use bookmarks as intended by these word processors it makes it difficult, but unfortunately this is the only way for us to support bookmark citations across the Word and LibreOffice
  • ilc168
    Thanks for the reply. Noted on how bookmarks work; however, is it expected behaviour some remain under custom properties after they are deleted in the main document?

    If you take a look at the screenshot for the items listed on the left - many of those have been removed or deleted and don't exist in the document. But they still exist under custom properties.

    The ones on the right (ie. under bookmarks) are all fine.

    Does that make sense?
  • dstillman
    Why do you think they're deleted? The numbering is just part of the encoding — that doesn't in any way imply that they're not still being used. Zotero embeds metadata in the document, and in this case you're just seeing part of the long abstract that's in the metadata.
  • ilc168
    edited July 3, 2019
    Hi there,

    I had a larger document with multiple chapters (let's say) Ch1,2,3,4.

    I split the larger document into 4 separate documents, and it looks like, for example, Ch 3 has metadata from references from Ch 2, even though they don't share the same references nor the same bookmarks*. This was the same for the other chapters.

    I guess when I split it (and deleted the other sections not needed) is when the issue arose.

    *not sure if this is the right language, but using "bookmarks" for those I can see in LO under bookmarks heading and "metadata" for the items listed under properties>custom properties

  • dstillman
    Did you click Refresh after deleting text?
  • ilc168
    Yes, no change
  • ilc168
    @dstillman do you have any other suggestions I could try?
  • dstillman
    I've created an issue for this, but it may not be fixed anytime soon, so you should just ignore it. This has likely been the case for many years, and other than cluttering up the properties list, it shouldn't make a difference to the plugin's functionality.

    If you really want to delete the old bookmarks, one possible workaround might be to convert the document to use ReferenceMarks, delete all the remaining custom properties, and then convert it back to Bookmarks. (I'm not sure if there's some problem with that that I'm not thinking of.)
  • ilc168
    Thanks for creating the issue and the suggestion (I'll try it). The reason I found the issue initially was when working with Grammarly. It had a meltdown with all the properties associated with the file. That's the only 'working' inconvenience I've found so far. The additional file size associated with them was minimal (eg 500kb vs 100kb type level).

    My workaround for the Grammarly side at the moment is to start afresh and redo the bookmarks and citations.
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