OOo Portable and Zotero Citation Plug-In

[mart7t]

I have just spent 3 full days (on and off) trying to install Zotero v2.0 in OpenOffice portable v3.2. My OS is Win7-x64.
So far, I have tried all of the suggestions in the forums and even thought up a few new ones, all to no avail.
I am absolutely at my wits end.
I love OpenOffice and I love Zotero and I prefer to keep them together instead of separate.
OpenOffice non-portable works fine with Zotero and so does Microsoft Office. However, I travel around a lot between home and uni so I really need my zotero library to be available to me for use in OpenOffice portable where ever I happen to be.
Has anyone out there been successful in this endeavour? If so, can you share the secret? I'm quite exhausted already and I would love to download a copy of OpenOffice that has Zotero pre-installed in it. I do consider citation/referencing to be one of the most important functions of any word processor and I think zotero is the simplest, most convenient, and useful way to do this and it should be included in OpenOffice by default.

[Villeroy]

Simply enter "zotero" into the box at the top-right corner of this page.

[TheGurkha]

I think Zotero is the simplest, most convenient, and useful way to do this and it should be included in OpenOffice by default.

Neither OpenOffice Portable nor Zotero are created by the creators of the 'official' openOffice. And the whole point of a plug-in is that you opnly go and plug it in if you need it, instead of packing everything into the default installation.

However, I feel your pain. I use Zotero and had the devil of a job recently to get it working until I followed the advice in this thread: [Solved] Zotero and OOo 3.3 RC8.

[mart7t]

Thank you for the helpful suggestion. I have followed this suggestion again but still with the same result. By the way, I am talking about "portable" OpenOffice, not the regular installable OpenOffice and I have the idea that the portable version has been changed in some way to make it smaller and more portable, and that is why it is not compatible with zotero plugin. I have also tried to install the regular OpenOffice and it works just fine with Zotero.

Which OpenOffice do you use - regular or portable?

Another thing which confused me when configuring the sources for OpenOffice in Firefox, is the field which asks for the location of the "UNO JAR" files. Well, I selected the Java folder, because it contains plenty of jar files, but to no avail. Then I selected the UNO folder which contains the Java folder with its jar files, but also without success. Then I tried to point it to the Program folder which contains the UNO folder which contains the Java folder. And still, no jollies for me. Anyway, it's confusing and the instruction seems unclear to say the least. Do you have any thoughts on this?

[therabi]

Just a guess here but did you install Java with the portable OOo? That is where you need to look for the JAR files.

[mart7t]

Thank you for your guess; it sounds reasonable. I will surely give it a try and come back here with my result.

[RoryOF]

I think also you should raise this problem with the OOo Portable developers, and on a dedicated OOo Portable forum, if one exists.

[mart7t]

I installed Java on my local machine and copied the files into the java folder as per the instructions. Still getting errors. I will try to visit some other forums, esp for the portable version of OO in the hope of finding a fix.

[Greengiant224]

There is a problem with all portable versions of OOo not recognising the java path/s.
It would appear that this has been brought to the attention of the portableapps guys back a far as 2008 and they mentioned it was an OOo glitch.
However, they say a workaround may appear. I won't hold my breath.

The problem appears when you re-open OOo portable. The internal script files are re-written back to the default.
Hence, your java settings and classpaths are destroyed. If you don't need java in portable OOo this is a boon.

As OOo is written and controlled by many scripts, perhaps there may be someone at this forum who would know exactly how to fix this problem.
My own feelings are that if it is a jar, it could added to the fundamentabasis script which would make it 'work' everytime.

Any takers?