Intermittent 'error updating your document'

saintduxi · 2025-07-29T11:51:19+00:00

Report ID: 1447011592

I'm experiencing a problem when attempting to insert citations into my Word doc - I get the error message 'Zotero experienced an error updating your document'. It's happening most of the time, but occasionally goes away. I haven't been able to put my finger on what's causing it, or what makes it temporarily stop.

Details:
- System: M1 iMac
- MS Word version: 16.99.1
- Zotero version: 7.0.22

Troubleshooting steps tried so far:
- Closing and reopening Word and Zotero
- Opening and testing a new document in word (same problems)
- Closing clipboard assisting software (in my case 'Paste' and 'Rockettypist')
- Uninstalling and reinstalling Zotero

Nothing so far seems to have worked. Any advice very gratefully received!

adomasven · 2025-07-29T12:50:15+00:00

It is your clipboard software interfering. It only happens when you cite items that contain non-latin characters (or latin with diacritics). You should ensure it's fully disabled, and might try to termporarily remove it and restart your Mac.

saintduxi · 2025-07-29T13:07:51+00:00

Thanks! I'm not sure that quite reflects my experience, though. For example, I was experiencing the issue while rockettypist and pastepal were shut down, and I was getting the error message when trying to insert the following reference, which as far as I can see doesn't contain any diacritics or non-latin characters?:

Roderick S. Edmond, ‘Writing Islands’, in Literature and Place 1800–2000, ed. by Peter Brown and Michael Irwin (Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 199–218 (p. 205)

adomasven · 2025-07-29T13:29:59+00:00

This also happens if the citation requires any special formatting, so all bibliography entries, as well as styles like Chicago (full note), that italicize parts of the citation. The errors in your report log are consistent with interference from clipboard software.

saintduxi · 2025-07-30T08:22:43+00:00

Thanks again. The problem is persisting this morning. I have every app on my mac shut down apart from Word and Zotero. I'm thinking there must be something else going on here?

dstillman · 2025-07-30T08:27:35+00:00

The clipboard apps might have installed services that persist when the apps are closed, but it's almost certainly caused by one of them. This is the only context in which we've seen this error, and it would be an incredible coincidence that you just happened to have two such apps installed on your system.

saintduxi · 2025-07-31T08:02:52+00:00

Thanks for your help with this, it's much appreciated.

I think I've isolated the specific issue. In case it helps anyone else: the error is occurring whenever my last use of the clipboard was to do a text expansion in RocketTypist. Where that is the case, copying something else onto the clipboard (just some normal text or whatever) fixes the problem.