Preview of citations and bibliographies

Codec

I have to write references in various formats for assignments. Depending which course I'm doing the citation format and biblio layout vary. There is a certain amount of latitude in format usually, provided it is reasonably close to the style given.

Therefore I would really appreciate a preview section, so that you could click on a citation style and get an indication (with dummy data, or the actual citation) of what it would look like - in both formats. Then I could pick a format that looked pretty close to what I needed.

Another useful item would be a meta-layout preview, so you could see what information would be used if you chose that style. For example, it might say something like
AUTHOR (YEAR) TITLE, JOURNAL, PUBLISHER
so I can see that it is worth filling in the publisher for this format, but that location is not useful.

scot

Until something like this exists, you might just take a record (or a book and a journal article) for which you have full bibliographic data, and export it (CTRL-ALT-C on windows) in each of the available formats, copy it to an HTML document add titles and re-capture it all in Zotero. Presto. A preview of everything. At the moment there aren't too many supported styles, and the ones there are fairly... ancestral in terms of the different bibliographic formats, so the project wouldn't be too hard, and will be useful even after new ones get added.

It is true though that a preview will be increasingly useful as we get closer to the CSL project's ideal of hundreds of user-maintained bibliographic styles provided on the internet in a decentralized manner.

Hopefully it will again become less useful as we get closer to One Format to Rule Them All, but that'll be some time yet, and will depend on a lot of people coming around to seeing things My Way, which for some reason people are rather disinclined to do.

scot

Also check out the editable preview by putting selecting a Zotero item and pasting the following into your address bar:

chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul

Note that on windows anyway, the pull down menu to select the style is about 3 pixels high and almost invisible, but it works.

bluepants

That works well for me (Portable Firefox with the MacfoxIIGraphite theme, Windows XP), and the pull down menu is totally visible and functional. Great tip! Thanks!