import from selection

cmagic · May 15, 2007

Hi,

First of all, thanks for a great ffx extension which really makes building a bibliography fun !
One thing I would find convenient would be a feature to allow creation of biblio entry from a selection.
For example, when I stumble upon a website with a textual bibtex entry such as :
@inproceedings{....
(..)
..., Year= {2005}}

What I do to create the entry is
1/select the text and copy (crtl-v)
2/create a blank ref.bib file in an external texteditor or notepad
3/paste the bibtex ref in the newly created file, save it
4/finally import the bib file into Zotero

It would be great to just select the bibtex entry in the webpage then have some command like "import from selection".

..or this might already be possible using some smarter trick !

Anyway thanks for a great software,

Cheerd,

Christian

noksagt · May 15, 2007

I'd like to tweak cmagic's request & ask that pages which have this kind of bibliographic format inclusion be auto-detected (as with COinS, etc.).

dstillman · May 15, 2007

At least for noksagt's request (which I agree would be preferable), someone could probably quite trivially write a translator for this that grabs the BibTeX and calls the BibTeX translator. The main problem is that, unlike COinS, which just calls getElementsByTagName("span"), such a translator wouldn't be able to use the DOM at all and would have to do a regex on the entire page content (document.documentElement.textContent), and since it would have to run on every page, it might carry a bit of a performance penalty. Might be fine, though.

I've created a ticket for this. Feel free to take it.

mcswell · September 18, 2007

Just a suggestion--don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. The original request was to parse a selection as bibtex, and import it. There's a fair amount of work there, I think. While I would love to see this enhanced to (a) automagically recognize bibtex on a page, and (b) recognize other formats, with the latter possibly being a performance hit, it means a lot more work.

The good things about these enhancements are that they can be done incrementally, and that each stage would be incrementally useful. So my suggestion is to start with the original idea, make a lot of users happy, and when that works, then go on to the other ideas.
~~~~