Fwd: Citation processing via Zotero + zotxt

[Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com>]

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On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Richard Lawrence <
richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> For the past few days, I've been looking more closely at using the
> combination of Zotero [1] with Erik Hetzner's zotxt plugin [2] as a
> means of processing citations when exporting to non-LaTeX backends.  I
> am now thinking that this is probably our best option, but I'd like to
> know what other people think before I sink a lot of work into it.
>
> Here are the reasons I think this is the best option:
>
> 1) It is really easy for users.
>
> For those unfamiliar, Zotero is a reference manager, and zotxt is a
> Zotero plugin that makes it easier to work with Zotero from plain text
> documents.  Both are Firefox plugins, which means they can be installed
> by a non-technical user with a couple of clicks.  It also means that
> users get updates automatically.  I think this is *really* important.
>
> 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.
>
> Also, unlike the other options, Zotero is a full-featured reference
> manager, not just a batch processor.  So we as users get a useful piece
> of software with a simple installation procedure; the other options
> require a complex installation procedure for a less-useful program.
>
> 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]
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Erik has also written a package for communicating with zotxt from Emacs,
> zotxt-emacs [4], which is available on MELPA.  This package already
> contains a lot of useful functions for querying the Zotero database and
> inserting reference data into documents, including links in Org
> documents.  I think it would be pretty straightforward to extend this
> package to provide a nice UI for writers who are inserting citations
> into Org documents, including search-based lookups of keys, etc.
> Perhaps org-ref could also be taught to communicate with zotxt (with or
> without zotxt-emacs) without too much work.
>
> 3) It uses citeproc-js.
>
> In previous discussions, I think we agreed that it would be best for us
> to use citeproc-js as a CSL processor, since it is the `canonical' CSL
> implementation, as opposed to pandoc-citeproc or citeproc-java.  Zotero
> just uses citeproc-js internally to process citations, so it meets this
> requirement.
>
>
> I know that many people (perhaps especially the `power users' who have
> been active in the citations discussion so far) prefer to maintain their
> reference database without the aid of a GUI reference manager like
> Zotero.  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?
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
> [1] https://www.zotero.org/
> [2] https://gitlab.com/egh/zotxt/
> [3] See the bibliographyEndpoint function in:
>     https://gitlab.com/egh/zotxt/blob/master/extension/bootstrap.js
> [4] https://gitlab.com/egh/zotxt-emacs
>
> I love Zotxt. my only concern is for those people who run a remote Emacs.
If, say, you run emacs on a server that you access by ssh, it will not be
possible to process your citations with org.

I personally don't use this method, though I have occasionally had to work
off of a server via some randome computer when my laptop breaks down.  For
me, this is a veyr rare case. Is there anyone on the list who might
actually be negatively affected by this?

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