Re: [O] zotero plain, org-odt, and citations in general

[Erik Hetzner]

Hi Jambunathan,

Thanks for the very detailed reply. Some responses below.

In your previous message, you asked who the author of zotero.el is. I
am. I will add author info.

At Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:47:30 +0530,
Jambunathan K wrote:
> 
> I think I now have some understanding of what Erik's library does[1]. 
> 
> It creates a bibliographic entry (as in Footnotes) using Quick Copy.  It
> doesn not create a footnote reference. One can use the Firefox Zotero
> and see how Quick Copy works with both RTF and HTML formats[2].

This is correct. I should note that this method is totally inadequate,
as Frank Bennett showed me, for the generation of documents formatting
according to the various style guides. It cannot handle in-text
citations, bibliographies, or cross references. To get some idea of
how this happens in zot4rst (part of zotero-plain), see [1].

I should also note that this process is complicated, involving a
number of steps. Have a look at the python dir in zotero-plain to get
an idea.

> [Question to Erik: Can one not use "Copy from Clipboard" from elisp
> instead of going the mozrepl route to create a biblio.text]

Yes, but then one cannot select an item in Zotero and insert a link
into an org doc from org itself.

I should note that while the org/zotero integration in zotero-plain
“works for me”, I would welcome changes to make it more robust and
feature-full. But I use org for notes and todo lists, not for document
production.

> Instead of working with JS libraries, I think the right starting point
> would be to work with the underlying zotero.sqlite database itself. It
> is not difficult to get a key of the selected item in Zotero
> pane[3]. Once this is done the underlying zotero.sqlite database could
> be queried for the item properties[4].
> 
> Fortunately there is already a GUI/Command line tool - Gnotero[5] -for
> accessing the sqlite database.

This would certainly work. However, one problem would be that gnotero
cannot generate formatted citations from a reference, that is, it
cannot use CSL [2] style rules to generate arbitrary citation
formats. This might be fine; some simple c
 
> As for exploiting the power of using zotero within libreoffice - which
> is to have the same citation presented in different citation styles -
> one need to look at how the reference marks are produced within
> OpenDocument XML.

Not only that, but how the LibreOffice plugin communicates with
Zotero, specifically the citeproc-js [1] part of Zotero, to generate
in-text citations, bibliographies, etc.

> […]
>
> Footnotes: 
> 
> [1]  With Mozrepl 1.1 beta2 on Firefox 3.6.23, I am unable to make
> org-zotero.el work. It hangs and I have to C-g out (Christian! you are
> not alone). I am able to get as far as creating the LIBRARY_KEY for the
> selected item in the zotero pane and not further.
>
> […]

Have you started MozRepl from Firefox? I re-installed mozrepl, checked
that I am using the latest (and unmodified) versions of moz.el and
zotero-plain. Everything seems fine. This is with Emacs 23 - perhaps
Emacs 24 changes things?

best, Erik

1. http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html
2. http://www.zotero.org/styles

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