Re: Citation processing via Zotero + zotxt

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

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.

> 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.

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...).

> 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.

I'm a Debian user, so I can appreciate your concern here.  But it's only
simpler to use the system package manager if all the dependencies are
already packaged for $YOUR_DISTRO, in a version that's up-to-date enough
for you to use.  Given the diversity of Org users, it seems likely that
we won't be able come up with a solution that goes via system package
managers that will work for everybody, at least not without a lot of
work.

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.

Best,
Richard