Export through website: Scannable Cite

apowers313

I'm not sure if this question belongs under website or under import / export...

In order to use the RTF / ODF Scanner with documents, citations need to be exported in the "Scannable Cite" format. Is there any way to export in that format from the website?

adamsmith

no, sorry. Only export formats that are native parts of Zotero can be exported from the webpage.

On a more meta level and apart from the technical issues involved, I believe Dan--Zotero's lead developer--disagrees with some of the design decisions Frank and I made for ODF Scan and so, when Zotero implements it's own improved document scan, it'll likely look a bit differently. Because of that, it makes sense that they'd make very clear that Scannable Cites aren't a Zotero feature.

All that said, the scannable cites can be constructed easily from information available via API, so if you're looking in that direction we could give you some pointers on how to make that happen.

dstillman

I believe Dan--Zotero's lead developer--disagrees with some of the design decisions Frank and I made for ODF Scan

(I should note that "disagrees" is a little strong — adamsmith and Frank have a much better idea of the requirements here than I do and have very good reasons for their design decisions. We just might make somewhat different decisions in an (as-of-yet-entirely-theoretical) official solution. In any case, as adamsmith says, this format isn't available from the API/website directly.)

apowers313

Thanks guys, I ended up using Alfred and ZotQuery for Scanable Cites, but that only gets me a solution on my desktop.

If you have suggestions about how I can jump in and write some code to get Scannable Cites out of the website, I'm game.

apowers313

One other question along the same lines -- would it be possible to write a MultiMarkdown scanner for Scannable Cites (similar to the RTF/ODF scanners)?

adamsmith

not in the same way, no (all the scanners use RTF as an output format for the actual citations. Zotero's citation engine doesn't produce MMD). But why not just use pandocs citation feature. Integrates nicely with Zotero, even nicer if you use zotxt.

apowers313

That's exactly what I needed, thanks.

Seems like maybe someday there should be a plugin API for inputs / outputs of the RDF/ODF Scan. Has that been contemplated?

adamsmith

Getting the Scannable Cite from the API is trivial - it's just the item's ID wrapped in some curly brackets, pipes, and with zu: in front of it. The question is what you want to do with it and how you want to retrieve it. That's the more difficult part to write.
I believe ZotQuery, for example, already generates scannable cites via the web API.

aurimas

A bookmarklet is now available that can be used on zotero.org to produce Scannable Cites. See Inserting Citations > From zotero.org here