large mac document/ error -1728

Hi. I just consolidated my book chapters into a single file of ~93K words including notes (nearing completion!), but when I did so, the Zotero plugin for Word 2008 (os x) is unable to refresh the citations. It returns a long Word error message, too long to type it all in here, but the significant part seems to be: "CommandError: -1728: The Object you are trying to access does not exist." (I could email a screen grab of the error message.)

This began before I updated to 2.0b6, but has continued once I updated. It does not happen when I use a smaller document. I'm using Word 2008 for Mac 12.1.9, Firefox 3.5.1, and OS X 10.5.7.

Thanks!
  • edited July 21, 2009
    Please e-mail the screenshot to support@zot....org, with a link to this thread. Thanks.
  • Emailed the screenshot. And for what it's worth, just upgraded to MS Office SP2, and still get the same error message.

    Cheers,
    Tom
  • I've narrowed the problem down to a single chapter. Broke the book back up into separate files for each chapter, and discovered that one of them alone created the error message. So it's not caused by large file size, but by something peculiar to that chapter. I removed the field codes from the chapter, ran the chapter through Open Office (load into OO, save as otf, load again, save as Word doc file), and for the moment it is not creating the problem. I'll email a copy of the faulty chapter to the support address.

    Cheers,
    Tom
  • The problem's back (sigh). It's reappeared in the file I filtered through OO. So if the file is corrupted, the corruption is buried somewhere deep in it. Ah well . . .
  • Well, in case anyone else ever has this problem, I finally fixed it. I went through the footnotes of the offending chapter, reformatting each one to normal and then to Footnote Text, while also removing all odd fonts, extra carriage returns, and any other oddities I could find. (The chapter was made up of work that I'd been cutting and pasting for several years, so god knows what all the notes originally came from.)

    I apologize for not testing each change one-by-one as I reformatted things, which would have helped narrow the problem down to something more specific. "Select all" and search-and-replace were a lot faster than change/test/change/test . . . would have been.
  • Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. There was an invalid Zotero bookmark in your document. The new, soon-to-be-released versions of the plugins should automatically correct that in the future.
  • Thanks so much for all your efforts, here and in general!
  • 8 years later, I'm having exactly the same problem after putting together my phd dissertation in one file. After first saying repeatedly the zotero database is permanently closed, it now gives me error 1728, report ID 1353994486. I can't modify or add any sources. I'd appreciate your help!
  • What's your setup? Did you use Bookmarks or Fields/Reference Marks in the document?
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