citation style preview in repository?

ubartsch

Hi,
I only found zotero by accident on the quest for a firefox plugin that reliably lets me import references into RefMan.
Having found this I am well impressed with this tool and the ease of importing references is just fantastic. I have instantly converted my RefMan db to zotero!
[A useful hint: If you are annoyed that after importing from RIS your pubmed links dont work anymore: Open your exported RIS db with a regular text editor and use search and replace to to replace "PM:" by "http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/". voila! Still looking for similar uri for Web of Science?].

Further I am looking forward to the future features announced.
So here is my suggestion:
I would happily contribute by creating an own citation style, but it would make things much easier if there was a preview function on the repository site, so do not have to download all styles to find out which one is closest to the one I would like to create.
(I would like to see eg. The Journal of Neuroscience style as described in http://www.jneurosci.org/misc/ifa_organization.shtml ,
a variation of the Harvard Author Date style I suppose.)
Many thanks for considering this.

Keep on the great work!
Cheers
Ullrich

dstillman

it would make things much easier if there was a preview function on the repository site, so do not have to download all styles to find out which one is closest to the one I would like to create

You're absolutely right, and we hope to offer previewing eventually, but it would require a server-based CSL processor, and there currently isn't one that's as up-to-date as Zotero's JavaScript-based processor. (Zotero's processor could probably be separated out so that it could run on a web page, but each style would still have to be downloaded by the client, so it wouldn't be ideal. The easiest interim solution might be to run Firefox on the server and have it respond to processing requests.)

Also, you probably know this, but you can preview styles you have installed by selecting one or more references in Zotero and loading chrome://zotero/content/tools/cslpreview.xul.

ubartsch

maybe it would be possible to copy the html code result from a "local" csl parser as an intermediate solution?

bdarcus

You're absolutely right, and we hope to offer previewing eventually, but it would require a server-based CSL processor

Dan this isn't really true unless you assume users must be able to choose their own reference data for meaningful previews, which is not the case. It's quite enough to have standardized data that previews, say, books, chapters and articles.

I presume you have a script now that generates the styles index. Just enhance that to create a "preview" div that follows each entry, and use some simple JS to hide and disclose it.

Well, OK, maybe there's no easy way to have a script get Zotero to generate this preview file now? Am just saying that the assumption that's built into csledit and cslpreview does not have to accompany repository previewing.

dstillman

Dan this isn't really true unless you assume users must be able to choose their own reference data for meaningful previews, which is not the case. It's quite enough to have standardized data that previews, say, books, chapters and articles.

I wasn't assuming that. Even if it uses sample data, the script is still server-based (it runs automatically after every CSL commit) and needs either something like citeproc-rb or a server-based Firefox instance to generate the previews. The latter is possible, but it would require some Zotero-side changes and might not happen for a little while.

bdarcus

Right; OK.

bdarcus

Dan: Jaxer (a new JS-based server) might be useful?

dstillman

Jaxer (a new JS-based server) might be useful?

Looks cool, though no Linux support yet.

I assume it only supports the core Firefox JS engine and not XPCOM calls, however, so some parts of the Zotero CSL processor would still have to be rewritten/modularized, as they would be with Rhino. But looks promising nonetheless.

Rintze

I've recently been verifying and correcting some dev-styles with the use of chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul, chrome://zotero/content/tools/cslpreview.xul, the Zotero style repository and the Word plugin. After working for a while with these tools, I have some questions/remarks, mostly regarding the preview of the style repository:

- Could you make a link available with the RDF-data of the citation data of the items used in the style preview? This way I can easily check which fields are filled, and what item types are used.
- The preview currently doesn't provide clear information about how bibliographies are organized (alphabetically, in order of citation), or how multiple citations are collapsed/ordered. Also, only a single citation field is shown, quite often of a item type that isn't particularly relevant to the style. Adding some text in the citation preview field, and using multiple citations would really help here (e.g. the citation preview field could show something like: "Book (1). Book chapter, news article, movie, cited in that order (2-4). Movie, book chapter, cited in that order (2, 4).")

Rintze

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