Hi Richard,

First, thank you for looking into this.  I learned something new from this

> Pretty much all the other options we have talked about seem like they
> will require multi-step, non-trivial installation procedures ("First
> install {Node.js/Haskell/JVM ...}, then install
> {citeproc-node/pandoc-citeproc/citeproc-java...}, then install our
> wrapper script...").  Updating could require other manual operations of
> similar complexity.  Avoiding that kind of procedure will make citations
> a lot more usable from Org for everyone.

I think this is *very* important.

> 2) It is quite complete.
>
> Previously, I thought that it would be a similar amount of work to
> communicate with Zotero from Emacs as any of the other CSL
> implementations out there.  However, after looking at zotxt a bit more
> closely, I discovered that it has an (undocumented) API endpoint [3]

This sounds amazing, but also dangerous.  Do you know whether stabilizing
the API has been discussed upstream?

> that pretty much does exactly what we need: it accepts a list of
> citation objects, and returns a list of formatted citations and a
> formatted bibliography, which can be inserted into the exported
> document.

Could you give an example of the sort of input you give?  I.e. is it based
on keys?  From my bibtex-centric world view I imagine something like:

   I send key or pointer @K to a DB entry as well as a CSL-file pointer C,
   and maybe a desired output format F.  I get a string back that is the
   formatting of the data behind @K formatted according to the rules in C,
   adapted to F.

Is that correct?  If so, does it support html, text and odt?

> This endpoint still needs a little bit of work, to generalize it and
> make it easier to get the data in the format we need.  (That is probably
> why it is undocumented in the README.) But it requires much less work
> than I thought it would, and much less work than it would be to get a
> full-featured setup with something like citeproc-node.

This is a very strong argument.

At some point Matt talked about adding support for org citation syntax in
citeproc-js.  Would this be advantageous if going this route?  I guess not.

>

IMO we can leverage zotero as a tool, but we cannot enforce it as a
bibliography manager.

> I still think Zotero + zotxt is the best option for non-LaTeX
> citation processing, even for these folks.  The ease of installation
> (and removal) of the required programs alone makes it worth it, even if
> you never actually populate a Zotero database.  So given what I know at
> the moment, I think our efforts would best be directed at making the
> in-progress org-cite library communicate with Zotero via zotxt.  What do
> you think?

+1, though re zotxt we should make sure Erik would want to move it to
GELPA.