Bibliography Plugin?

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Andreas Stahlbauer <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> New question #215367 on Zim:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/zim/+question/215367
>
> I need a tool to add bibliographic references to texts within Zim; is
> there already a plugin that allows me to link, for example, bibtex-files to
> the zim wiki and and reference to items of it?
>

No there is no such plugin at the time. I do know some people use zim to
generate latex and use bibtex, but they link manually.

> What would be the best starting point to develop my own Zim plugin that
> allows me to simple link bibtex-entries?

Start with a good description of how it should work. Describe it from the
point of view of a user.

I could think of
* Menu item "insert bibtex reference"
* Dialog with items to choose from
* Results in link like [[bibtex://referencename|referenename]]
* Clicking the link opens the same dialog, shows details of reference
* On export to latex, put correct latex code to link to bibtex

If you want such a thing the dialog would need to do the following:
* preferences to set location of bibtex file(s) (alternative is to have
them in a standard location in the notebook)
* code to extract reference details from a bibtex file and create a dialog
(in python)
* register URL scheme "bibtext" so it can handle clicks
* modify latex export for these links (can not be done from plugin at the
moment, hard code in latex exporter)

I think the main part of work is to extract reference details from the
bibtex to present them in a nice way. But maybe there are existing python
modules for that. Alternative a first version could just present the raw
code from the bibtex entry. For the other parts I can give you pointers of
what code to copy paste.

Now keep in mind that this scheme does not allow you to actually add bibtex
entries from zim - that would be additional work with a dialog etc.

Regards,

Jaap