Citation management for HTML editors or web authoring applications?

chiako
Hello,
I have been using Zotero MS Word plug-in to manage my inline citations and references. However most writing I do nowadays are for posting online and it is often easier to directly write in an HTML editor or web authoring application, this way I don't have to deal with all the junk generated by the Word-HTML conversion. But as I am aware of, the most time saving utility offered by Zotero--the automatic refreshing, citation style changing, and re-ordering of citation numbers (e.g. in IEEE style) is only available in the MS Word plug-ins. Is there a similar utility for HTML editor or web authoring application? If not I really wish there were...
  • adamsmith
    The cleanest solution is to write in markdown and use Pandoc for conversion to html and citations (with a bibtex file exported from Zotero).
    http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
    markdown is designed to convert to super clean html.

    I doubt anything particular for html is going to happen, but the pandoc solution is quite elegant.
  • noksagt
    If you go with pandoc, I'd imagine that you'd want to work with MODS XML (pandoc converts bibtex to MODS before processing anyway).
  • adamsmith
    I wondered about that. I know that pandoc converts .bib to MODS and can use MODS directly, but what/where are the cite keys in MODS?
  • noksagt
    Hmm..I thought I had done this in the past with Zotero MODS, but you're right. pandoc seems to require identifiers that are currently absent from out MODS output.
  • bdarcus
    edited October 17, 2012
    The biggest problem with using Zotero with pandoc is the citekey issue. I at some point started to write a script to add keys to RIS output, but got distracted.
  • noksagt
    The best solution will be to have human-editable citekeys/local IDs in Zotero in the future. We could potentially have auto-generated keys in RIS, MODS, etc. if we wanted without much effort now (but, if these are only used in pandoc, I'd suggest this wasn't a great option).

    We could suggest a patch to pandoc that would assume common key formats if they were missing from the bibliography file (at least with the first author last name/last two digits of publication year that is used in examples). That seems like it'd make pandoc more useful, though may require too much effort for disambiguating references.

    A script that adds keys to RIS/MODS seems like low hanging fruit, though.

    Bruce: remind me again why you use RIS in your workflow?
  • adamsmith
    The best solution will be to have human-editable citekeys/local IDs in Zotero in the future.
    yes. We really need to get moving on this - it's coming up all the time - TeX, RTF-scan, Pandoc. From my perspective this is currently the single biggest problem/downside in Zotero.
    Dan - any thought on whether we can get this into the next version after the Nov. 20 release?
    A script that adds keys to RIS/MODS seems like low hanging fruit, though.
    why not just build it into a separate MODS export translator? We probably shouldn't ship that with Zotero, but from a user experience, just having to save a .js to the translator folder once seems ideal.
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