Zotero

[lvansnippenburg]

Dear José,

As an historian, Zotero is the application I use as much as my editor. Would be great if you could look at it. The user could type some keycombo (Joplin uses "z@"). For an example see https://github.com/mblode/vscode-zotero.

Kind regards,
Leo

[jsgrrchg]

Hi again, could you please explain in a bit more detail what you would expect the app to do in relation to this? I’m familiar with Zotero, but I’d like to better understand your workflow and what kind of support would be most useful so I can figure out how and when to add it, the app is very young, I may even refactor in the future to offer plugin support for extended capabilities, but we are not at that point quite yet.

About the feature, I can definitely imagine this being incredibly helpful for academics, especially when combining reference management with AI-powered automation, so I’m all ears.

[lvansnippenburg]

Hello José,

The most important thing would be to be to include references in my text, since this is essential for an historian. Other MD editors that support this usually rely on the BetterBibtex extension of Zotero. This extension will automatically keep a CSL/JSON file up to date with all the possible references in it (see attachment "library.json"). Often this file is used to setup a custom search dialog, but there is a better way (imo) by calling the URL http://127.0.0.1:23119/better-bibtex/cayw?format=pandoc . This will open a standard Zotero dialog which is already familiar to the user from MS Word or LibreOffice. As output you'll get a string that looks like the id field in the CSL/JSON file, with an @ prepended. This string can be parsed to find the related information from the CSL/JSON file and then processed to display the correct information to display in the rendered file (see for example https://github.com/typst/citationberg).

That way everything would work much the same as in MS Word, but much nicer and faster and easier and most importantly: without MS Word. Loads of researchers would love it!

Regards,
Leo

[jsgrrchg]

Thank you for taking the time and attaching a file, And yes, I can definitely see the potential. I’m going to study the feature carefully and see if I can implement it natively. I don’t want to rely on extensions yet, we are at pre 1.0 version, the product isn’t ready, the source code is very young, and there’s a lot of room for it to grow. I'm building this to extend capabilities for non coders especially, so this is exactly the kind of use cases that I'm looking for, just give me time, great apps take time to build.

Best,

José

[lvansnippenburg]

library.json

[lvansnippenburg]