[odf-discuss] EndNote and ODF (bibliography help - slightly OT)

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 10/17/06, Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org> wrote:

> I'm not sure what zotero has to do with office suites.  I mean, you have to
> explain to me how an application like KWord or Writer would neatly integrate
> with a firefox plugin.
> I can't see have a nice user experience, if there is any integration at all.

Well, let's look at how Endnote works. User can browse their
bibliographic database from within Word, and directly insert the
citation markers, which get formatted on-the-fly.

So let's imagine this for ODF. Maybe there's a common API that allows
OOo and/or KWord to hook up to any compliant bibliographic app. When
user adds a citation, the bibliographic app passes the raw
bibliographic metadata to the editor, it gets embedded in the file
package, and can be used to (re)generate the formatting. Because the
metadata is embedded according to ODF metadata conventions,  the file
is fully portable, not only between editors, but also bibliographic
databases.

> My requirement for KWord would be to have a way to add a 'tag' right in the
> text where I make a reference to a bibliography entry. Purely a
> non-human-readable reference.
> For displaying and printing I'd expect to have document wide settings for both
> the in-text and the end note formatting of the refence and I'd expect a
> nicely formatted version while viewing and editing the document.

Right.

> I (as the author of KWord) am interrested if zotero can do that. Let me know
> how we can help each other.

Zotero has a Javascript-based citation formatter, which uses my
Citation Style Language (CSL)* for formatting configuration. Right
now, it does not interact with word processors, but that is a next
step, and they've done a proof-of-concept with Word. So you can
imagine that if we can settle on a good generic API, that might be a
way for apps like Zotero to easily integrate not just with Word, but
also with OOo, KWord, etc.

On the formatting bit above, I suppose it'd be ideal if there was a
little library or script that could work within the editor.

If that sounds good, perhaps we could talk more off-list? The ODF
metadata work that will help make this possible will have other
benefits for extension development.

Bruce

* <http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl/>