2.0 Word Plug-in broke all old citations

sterow
Hi, I just upgraded to 2.0 from the latest non-sync version, and also upgraded the Word plug-in. I'm using Word 2007 on a PC.

The first time I tried to add a reference I got a warning that the plugin would irrevocably upgrade my document. Fine - I wasn't worried about that. But what it has actually done is broken all but one of my pre-existing Zotero citations (I can't work out what's different about the one that was unaffected). They are now just plain text and the plug-in no longer recognises them as Zotero citations. When I generate a bibliography it only finds two items: the one pre-existing reference that survive, and one new one added with the new plug-in.

I assume this isn't the intended behaviour (if it is, the warning needs to be much more explicit).

I can fix this one one document manually with relative ease, but am now apprehensive about working with any of my more substantial project documents that have dozens of existing references.

Any help? I love Zotero but this is a big obstacle to my continued use of it as I am mid-project and need to work with many documents prepared with the old plug-in.
  • dstillman
    Do you have a backup of the original file before upgrading it with the alpha plugin? If so, can you reproduce this problem by re-upgrading the file?

    If not, can you reproduce it with (a copy of) another document?
  • joehill
    I'm having a similar problem with the OO plugin since I upgraded to 2.0a4 from 2.0a3. Some documents seem to work fine but in others the citations are no longer recognized. I'm not seeing a consistent pattern--sometimes it treats the citations like plain text and tells me there are no Zotero citations at all, and in other documents, when I click the "Edit citation" button, it highlights the citation (hence recognizing it as something) but doesn't give me the citation editor. In either case, the old bibliography is treated as plain text and only newly added citations show up in a new bibliography.
  • dstillman
    joehill: Did you by any chance save a file with reference marks (as opposed to bookmarks, which are designed for cross-platform compatibility) as a .doc file? That's the only way we've seen that citation fields have been converted to plain text.
  • sterow
    I have tried it again as Dan suggested (with a different file - didn't have the old version of the new one) and couldn't replicate the problem.

    This would seem to give me a work around as I can make sure to back files up before I convert them to the new plug-in (assuming / hoping that the problem only occurs with the initial conversion), but it would be nice to get to the bottom of this. I appreciate it's hard if I can't replicate the issue though.
  • joehill
    Dan, thanks for your suggestion. In the document I'm working on now, it's an .odt file, and the references weren't exactly converted to plain text--if I unzip and look at content.xml, the old, non-functioning references look identical to the new, working ones I put in after the upgrade. And Zotero recognizes them, highlighting them if I click the "edit citation" button but it doesn't open the edit dialog.

    When I opened the document this time after the upgrade and then tried to add a reference, the document settings dialog popped up asking if I wanted to use bookmarks or fields, as if I had never used Zotero with this document before. The "fields" option was selected by default (as it always is--for some reason this is the default even in OO). I believe that, in fact, I mindlessly clicked "ok" but then went back and changed it to "bookmarks" as soon as I realized my references had stopped working. I'm not sure why the dialog came up in the first place, since I had already selected the preferences and inserted dozens of citations.

    If that's what happened, this leads to a user interface question: why is the default setting whenever I start a new document in OO "fields"? It seems to me that the default should be "bookmarks," and maybe the unusable "fields" option should be removed altogether, since I'm not sure of any use it has in OO besides messing things up.

    Joe
  • noksagt
    why is the default setting whenever I start a new document in OO "fields"? It seems to me that the default should be "bookmarks," and maybe the unusable "fields" option should be removed altogether, since I'm not sure of any use it has in OO besides messing things up.
    Fields should be fine if you keep your file as an OpenDocument ODT. The wording in the plugin is wrong. Field support doesn't work in OO.o when using the MS DOC format.
  • joehill
    I see, thanks for clarifying. In that case that's not what broke these references, since I'm only using odt. So I still have no idea why this document is full of references I can't edit.
  • dstillman
    The wording in the plugin is wrong.
    Yeah, the default should be "Reference Marks" rather than "fields" in OpenOffice. If it isn't, that's a (relatively new) bug.

    But if your citations still exist and look like all others, Joe, then your issue probably isn't related to sbr's. Provide a Report ID from Report Errors after trying to edit a citation, plus an example of the underlying codes for an old citation and a new citation.
  • joehill
    Report ID: 1893945001

    Here's what the references in content.xml look like, plus the bibliography that gets generated (pretty-printed for clarity and without surrounding text). The only reference that Zotero allows me to edit is the last one, Krasner (2001), which I added after the upgrade. All the other ones, as I mentioned, get highlighted but no editor appears.


    <text:p text:style-name="First_20_line_20_indent">
    <text:s text:c="2"/>
    <text:bookmark-start text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_XeZ5XvmQ0eO4"/>(Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 297)<text:bookmark-end text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_XeZ5XvmQ0eO4"/>. Agamben <text:bookmark-start text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_JrFXqsCagl3o"/>(1998, 2005)<text:bookmark-end text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_JrFXqsCagl3o"/>, <text:s/>
    <text:bookmark-start text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_jsee15cuxDZV"/>(Schmitt 2006)<text:bookmark-end text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_jsee15cuxDZV"/>, Krasner <text:bookmark-start text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_CWa1fclqH6Gb"/>(2001)<text:bookmark-end text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_CWa1fclqH6Gb"/>
    </text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="P3">Bibliography</text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="P4">
    <text:bookmark-start text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_iAaN7dYNI4vP"/>Krasner, Stephen D. 2001. Abiding Sovereignty. <text:span text:style-name="T1">International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique</text:span>
    <text:span text:style-name="T2"> 22, no. 3 (July): 229-251. doi:10.2307/1601484.</text:span>
    <text:bookmark-end text:name="ZOTERO_BREF_iAaN7dYNI4vP"/>
    </text:p>
  • ploring
    Did this get resolved? I have several old documents in Openoffice that I was composing in .doc format with bookmarks, (before I knew better and switched to .odt and reference marks). I can't open any of them without blowing away all the references (the in text cites become clear text) as the result of the necessary 'upgrade'. Is there a path to converting these documents that doesn't lose my citations? (please? please?)
  • ploring
    Note: Zotero 2.0b7.4 and extension 3.0

    thanks!
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