Re: Citation processing via Zotero + zotxt

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Hi Richard, 

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

> Hi Matt and all,
>
> Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> Well, I would guess that many people who are interested in this already
> have Firefox installed, and after that, you just need to install two
> Firefox plugins: Zotero and zotxt.  Open a couple of links, give your
> permission, and that's it.
>
> If you're skeptical, I encourage you to try it:
>
> https://www.zotero.org/download/
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zotxt/
>
> It's pretty easy.  And removing the plugins via about:addons is just as
> easy.

Thanks for the links. I'll try them out. But for bibtex users, wouldn't
there presumably have to be another zotero plugin that would allow for
live, automated importing of bibtex into zotero? (If anyone knows
whether such a plugin exists, please do let me know.)

> We have discussed this before, and in fact, I already started work along
> this route: see https://github.com/wyleyr/org-citeproc
>
> I stopped because people objected that distributing a Haskell program is
> too difficult.  Even if you can install pandoc-citeproc via your
> system's package manager, to build org-citeproc against it you need a
> complete Haskell build environment, which is (somewhat notoriously)
> difficult to work with, and too much to expect for the average person
> who just wants citation support in their Org documents.  Nor has anyone
> volunteered to take care of building and distributing a binary for every
> platform we'd want to support (including, I assume, Windows and OS
> X...).

Thanks for your work on this. I would agree that compile a haskell
program makes this a nonstarter for many users.

A thought experiment... Do we need a fork of pandoc-citeproc? Or could
we rather write an emacs-lisp wrapper that would feed citation data and
a bibliography to pandoc and receive a string containing citations
formatted in org syntax (one of pandoc's outputs). This could be done
via an export filter, with all the necessary manipulation being done on
the emacs/org side of things.

Pandoc is available in several linux distributions (in addition to the
deb file released by the project) and installers are available OS
Windows, so most people wouldn't need to compile it.

> The nice thing about Firefox (and these days, Emacs) is that it's a sort
> of cross-platform package manager.  If the citation processing
> dependencies are just Firefox plugins, they'll be much more accessible
> to a much wider group of people without a lot of work on our part.  So,
> that's why I'd prefer depending on Zotero to depending on something like
> org-citeproc or citeproc-node.

Javascript interpreters/engines are widely available for all platforms
if we create a wrapper script around citeproc-js. Node itself is also
easily available for most platforms. But we wouldn't need to set it up
as a node server à la citeproc-node.

Thanks so much for all your work on this. I'm happy to help out wherever
I can.

Best,
Matt