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

[Erik Hetzner]

At Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:51:22 -0500,
Matt Price wrote:
> 
> Responding to just a few of the excellent points raised by J 7 E
>
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Erik Hetzner <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > At Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:47:30 +0530,
> > Jambunathan K wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > 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.

This is me you are quoting, for the record.

> I'm trying to switch to using org for most of my writing; among other
> things, I now use it for posting to wordpress and (hopefully soon) drupal,
> where most of my teaching work takes place. So I htink there's a case to
> make for org as a person's main workspace.

Definitely! Whatever works for you. I prefer the reStructuredText
syntax for longer documents, so getting real citations working in
org-mode is not a real priority for me. That’s all.

> Wouldn't the rigt target be, not the sqlite db, but the Zoteor *service*
> that runs on port 50001 when Zotero is running?  Aren't there some
> higher-level tools for working through that interface -- e.g., erik, your
> rst tool uses a python library, does it talk to Zotero that way?

the server that runs on port 50001 is undocumented, last I
checked. And there are no tools to connect to it. Frank Bennett put
together a hack of the jsbridge Firefox extension which works quite
well. [1] But that is python only, as far as I can tell.

> […]
> 
> so, couldn't one think of the problem as having three parts:
> (1) get emacs to talk to the zotero server; and
> (2) figure out how org/emacs should interact with citeproc
> (3) translate the org zotero links into a syntax that LibreOffice
> recognizes and can successfully manipulate

I think that is a good summary of what needs to be done. (3) is what
zot4rst does not bother to do.

The task of weaving together the HTML output from citeproc and your
export document can be tricky.

> and am I further right that, as an interim measure, solving (1) and (3)
> properly and throwing together a quick hack for (2)  -- in which org
> supports exactly one, very simple citation style -- would make a workflow
> possible in which a person could compose in Org, and translate to ODT for
> the final processing of a document, and/or export to HTML using only the
> one citaqtion style that is supported by the aforementioned hack?
>
> […]

Yeah, that makes sense. I think (3) is optional as well, depending on
what your workflow looks like, and what your needs are for doing final edits.

best, Erik

1. https://github.com/mozautomation/mozmill

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