RTFScan ported to other formats

To Simon and the Zotero ppl,
If you would like the extend this feature to support other document formats, we would welcome your contributions.
Did I misinterpreted the sens of your quote? I sometimes get the answer: "if you want it, do it yourself", usually when someone has a "parti pris". I thought the quote was a kind of polite irony. Well, if I misunderstood, I present you my apologies.

the rtfscan is an appealing feature. But I would rather have a simple text document to convert, than a rtf document to convert.

Could a textscan be possible, as feature request? Is there any future development plan to support additional scan formats?

Thank you
  • I don't think the devs will put any resources into this - your main concern with RTF seems to be purist - as you know there is a bit of a debate between purists and pragmatists in open source, and Zotero has been decidedly on the pragmatist side - supporting Word, a Safari plugin, heavily relying on PDF etc.

    From a pragmatist point, RTF is pretty ideal and was also pretty easy to do, as the plugins in Word and LO use RTF under the hood anyway. There is just not a great incentive to invest more time for something that would essentially just double-up the functionality of RTF scan (which is currently quite limited anyway, and would very much benefit from some improvements).

    If you have problems with the ideological purity of this, there are various existing alternatives that are 100% free & open source:
    - Use some version of TeX - e.g. through lyz/lyx, using Bibtex and autozotbib etc.
    - Use zotero-plain https://bitbucket.org/egh/zotero-plain/overview either with emacs or reStructured text and docutils
    - Find a solution using Zotero, Pandoc and one of the other citeproc implementations - I think some people are doing that.
    And, of course:
    - Write something yourself

    Simple text, in particular, is very limited and cannot produce correct citations in most styles (no superscripts, no footnotes, no italics/bold), so I don't see how it's a terribly attractive option, especially given the already existing alternatives.
    But, obviously, you're more than welcome to develop this. Which is, btw., the actual reason to get a "if you want it, do it yourself" reply: Devs are telling you that they have no interest in implementing something, so the only way to get it is doing it yourself or finding someone else to do it. That has always been how this has been used in FOSS projects.
  • Thank you for you input. After lecture of your answer, in particular, the plug-in chapter, I have no reserve anymore. Sorry all.
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