The errors should specify what the problems are. If the citation could not be found it means the @key is not present in your database, check for typos etc.
I finally found docdown: GitHub - lowercasename/docdown: A menu bar app to convert Markdown into academia-ready Word documents — it does just bundle pandoc and zotero.lua together and provides a UI to run them. That is good news in that this just provides a GUI for the same commands. Formatted citations work for me with this tool, but I also get an error when using live citations. I tried to update the bundled pandoc and zotero.lua to the latest versions but the same error occurs so the problem is somewhere in the javascript code. The error doesn’t occur with pandoc and zotero.lua directly so the problem is specific to docdown.
Apologies, I didn’t realise you were looking for it. I thought I’d linked it at some point.
The errors are that the items cab’t be found, will need to run it again and check to see if the sources/cite keys have been deleted but can’t for the next little while
My citations don’t import into Word live using Lua, so there must be two issues at play for me.
Which pandoc are you using, you can use these commands: which pandoc and pandoc --version — paste the output of these commands from the terminal here. Here are my results:
➪ which pandoc
/opt/homebrew/bin/pandoc
➪ pandoc --version
pandoc 3.6.3
Features: +server +lua
Scripting engine: Lua 5.4
User data directory: /Users/ian/.local/share/pandoc
Create a minimal markdown file test.md containing only one citation and put it in the same folder as zotero.lua. Here is an example using a citation from my database (your citekeys will be different).
---
title: Citation Test
author: Jane Doe
zotero:
client: zotero
csl-style: apa
---
# Sun
Test [@barrett2015].
# Moon
Test.
Start Zotero, check it is up to date (mine is 7.1-beta.11+fb8b65b32, I’m imagine the non-beta would also be fine) and make sure the reference citekey from your test.md is in the database, this is mine [@barrett2015] as an example:
In terminal cd to the folder that should only contain test.md and zotero.lua.
Now we can run pandoc directly, we pass --verbose to make sure we get feedback in the terminal window — note on my system we see feedback that zotero.lua ran and we see the filter fetched the URL (Fetching http://127.0.0.1:23119/better-bibtex...) that contains the reference in the Zotero database so we know that the reference was fetched:
I always break down a problem to what is called the minimal working example (MWE). When we know that is working then add the bits one by one until we find where the problem is. For problems with the live citations, this doc details the troubleshooting steps: kb:debugging_broken_documents [Zotero Documentation]