Re: Citation processing via Zotero + zotxt

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:

> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> 2. How would I use this starting from an org-bibtex database (which I
>>    typically export to bibtex)?
>
> I can envision a couple of possibilities.  One simple option would be to
> switch to managing your reference database with Zotero, by exporting
> from org-bibtex to .bib, and then importing the .bib into Zotero.
>
> I don't want to force that on anyone, though.  Another option is to
> use the org-bibtex to produce .bib at export time, and then use Zotero
> to read the .bib and process citations when exporting to non-LaTeX formats.
>
> This second option is more work, as I don't know of any API for loading
> items into Zotero's citation processor in BibTeX format.  But given that
> Zotero is able to import .bib files, I imagine this API would not be too
> much work to build.

Given these complexities, it seems that if we went the zotero route we
could end up with a fairly large installation chain (firefox, zotero,
zotxt, plugin for zotero). And this would require installing items from
multiple, heterogeneous sources.

I wonder at this point whether pandoc-citeproc (packaged with pandoc)
would actually be the simpler route. It can parse bibtex files directly
and (as a filter within pandoc) can output formatted citations in org
format.

As a GNU/Linux user, I would find installing zotero and all the add-ons
messier and more cumbersome than installing pandoc and/or node-js (were
we to use citeproc-js) from the command line.

Best,
Matt

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