[Request] Support for Cite Keys?

Sociopoetic

Good morning,

I've been processing my reading notes into The Archive. It occurred to me that support for a cite key (@AuthorYear, etc) would be useful, since I later transfer notes into my editor to be able to draft the forum posts and papers required for my courses and then export those to other formats.

Does the Archive have this function? Could it in the future?

MikeBraddock

@Sociopoetic

See if this helps,
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/5523/#Comment_5523

I used that comment to help me see how to handle citations in The Archive.

ctietze

MultiMarkdown citations are encouraged, and their use will expand with version 2 onward; which markup format are you coming from, @Sociopoetic ?

Sociopoetic

@ctietze, I'm referring to BibTeX cite keys. I'm setting up my working environment to use a cite-as-you-write setup. Because so many of my papers first incarnate as notes from my reading, I wondered if I could use the same setup in The Archive. I'm happy to use MMD citations, though it means having to convert citations in my later editing of a paper.

ctietze

@Sociopoetic That depends on how you produce the paper!

So you want the print-ready PDF to contain citations in the form of (@AuthorYear, etc.).

The MultiMarkdown and Pandoc conventions insert a command to place a citation during later processing. In some cases, like on our blog, the output is HTML, so you get a footnote and clickable links and such. But if you transform Markdown to LaTeX, the actual command turns into \cite[citekey]. And you can mass replace these with \citep (for _p_arens) or configure the LaTeX converter to do that for you immediately. And the pdflatex command will insert the proper info from your BibTeX file.

In short: your Markdown notes encode the citation in a way that programs and humans can understand. When you run the file through processor software, it eventually transforms the Markdown code into human readable prose, with citations formatted according to whatever convention you set up (APA, MIT, ...).

If you don't use the LaTeX toolchain: I never tried to convert from Markdown to MS Word using Pandoc, just the other way around, but I believe that you can set up Pandoc to produce a citation with parenthesis directly, too.