Feature Request: Export note by markdown or LaTeX format

The operating situation.
When I finish making notes in Zotero, then I want to export the note as part of my manuscripts. It's okay for word users to find that notes including citations are inserted.
But things would be not such successful for pandoc users to export notes including citations. Only plain text is shown, not the citation format.
I usually write my manuscripts by VSCode including an extension called Citation Picker for Zotero and pandoc. The extension now doesn't allow users to insert a note, so it would be better to provide a way to make note transfer to markdown or LaTex format to make it easier to use/insert.
  • There is a way to export notes to markdown format:
    https://github.com/argenos/zotero-mdnotes
  • edited April 14, 2021
    Right, it can only export citation of notes as plain or html text
  • Let’s take a step back. What exactly are you trying to do? What is your exact expected workflow?
  • edited April 14, 2021
    I would like to export standalone note or child note and then import or copy it to vscode. In vscode, I can see the notes including citation in markdown format. Finally, I can use pandoc to transfer md to docx
  • There is not currently a workflow that can accommodate live citations from Zotero notes to markdown. You could manually insert pandoc citations by copying the citation key from the item pane and pasting it into the note. (If you aren’t already using the BetterBibTeX plugin, you will want to if you are using Zotero as part of a pandoc workflow.)

    Either the mdnotes plugin or the zot picker plugin could be updated to handle insertion of notes with live citations with Zotero’s new note writer currently in beta, but they haven’t yet been. @emilianoeheyns
  • I think the citation picker requires BBT.
  • That’s not necessary. Just enter the item’s citekey in the note. Pandoc will take care of formatting that into the citation style.
  • Mdnotes uses the item's citekey in the title of the exported note as default.
    e.g: * Mdnotes File Name: [[hegel_science_2010]]
  • But the citation key would be changed. WIll it be auto changed?
  • I'm afraid I don't know. I tried testing it in VSCode (which I don't use - I use LibreOffice writer these days) but couldn't get it to work with pandoc-citeproc (trying to render md file as docx produced errors).
    Hopefully @bwiernik can answer you about how the citekey will work in your workflow.
  • try pandoc citer in VScode @cjpoor
  • @starsareintherose citation picker worked for me but I couldn't get Pandoc Citer or vscode-pandoc to work. The experience with VSCode reminds me of trying to use Atom. As far as I could tell there were a lot of extensions that had problems and or conflicts. The high quality of the plug-ins is one of the reasons I like Zotero and LibreOffice. Anyway, all the best. Sorry I couldn't be of more help (not a coder :-)
  • I'm not familiar with the mdnotes plugin. The citation picker does require BBT, but I haven't worked on that in ages, and someone just reported a problem on it. I'll take a look when I can, but I'd generally recommend the actively maintained integration for vscode.

    I'm still not entirely clear on what the desired workflow will be. When you ask
    But the citation key would be changed. WIll it be auto changed?
    do you mean to ask whether the citation key will be changed in a note that was previously exported? Unless the tool you used for export (mdnotes?) has some kind of auto-export, the answer seems to me to have to be "no".
  • Thanks, I think if I don't fresh it, it would not be changed. Thanks
  • @starsareintherose if you are writing in markdown or latex with Zotero, you want to install the BetterBibTeX plugin. That ensures stable citekeys and allows you to set specific citekeys for items as you please.
  • I know there's a language barrier at play, but I do not understand the steps you are trying to complete, and unfortunately chances that I speak your native language are slim.
  • @starsareintherose If you want to write in markdown and then export to a Word document with "live" Zotero citations (that will be auto-updated and can be used by Zotero to produce a bibliography in your Word document) the only way I know is to use Scannable cite. I worked like that for some time using org-mode which is a plain text editor like VSCode. I describe my workflow at
    https://ontologicalblog.com/home/part-2/
  • If you want to write in markdown and then export to a Word document with "live" Zotero citations (that will be auto-updated and can be used by Zotero to produce a bibliography in your Word document) the only way I know is to use Scannable cite
    https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/pandoc/#from-markdown-to-zotero-live-citations
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