Bug: 'Replace this Zotero Field'

diego p
Hi folks,

today my Zotero went crazy: anytime I try add a citation after a certain point of the document a script pops up asking if I want to replace the Zotero field (there is no field).
If I click yes, or if I try edit the phantom field, all the text after that certain point is deleted automatically.

What the hell is going on? What is wrong with that point? I tried to delete the field at that very point but it did not work out..

I use Firefox 3.6.10
MS Word 2008 for Mac
Zotero 2.0.9 with Word plugin 3.0b3
on Mac OS X 10.6.4

Thanks a lot for your help
  • Simon
    Are you using fields or bookmarks?
  • diego p
    I am using bookmarks.
    I would like to solve the problem as it is now, but do you think that using fields would solve the problem? I tried to convert into fields but that does not work either...
  • Simon
    Yes, the problem is bookmarks. In Word, it's hard to know if you're typing in a bookmark, and there are a few cases where you can end up typing in a bookmark accidentally. Go to Insert->Bookmarks and select the option to sort by location. Double-click the last bookmark in the list. This will probably highlight a large portion of your document (the same part that's getting deleted when you press "Yes"). If not, try the bookmark before it. Once you have found the over-extended bookmark, delete it. In the future, you may want to either turn on Show Bookmarks in Word->Preferences->View or switch to Fields (which should work, once the problematic bookmark has been deleted).
  • diego p
    Dear Simon,

    the document I am working now (a test copy) seems to be badly corrupted and I get all sort of errors when I try work on it. I have however restored a previous version, affected by the same problem, I followed the steps you have indicated and it worked perfectly.
    The problem is now solved.

    Was not aware of the 'show bookmarks' feature - I will use it from now on to make sure everything is set.

    Thanks for the excellent guidance.

    Diego
  • diego p
    Dear Simon,

    a side-effect of what I did with Word is that the blinking cursor bar has now disappeared!
    Do you know how to sort this out, too?
  • Simon
    If I understand you correctly, the cursor at the insertion point (where new characters show up when you type text) is no longer appearing. This doesn't seem to happen on my computer, at least in a short document, but if it's happening to you, it's almost certainly a bug in Word. If you only have this problem when you enable Show Bookmarks, you might want to use Fields for editing, and then switch to Bookmarks only when you need to send your file to someone using OpenOffice.org.
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