The project is on Github. I've ported the guile json library to guile-1.8 so it can be used from TeXmacs, and I made a start on an rtf to texmacs converter, though I think it will be better to have Zotero send output as LaTeX (bbl), or even as TeXmacs scheme. It's easy enough to create a new output format. I have forked and patched versions of zotero and better-bibtex-for-zotero in my GitHub as well. Some patches to better-bibtex-for-zotero have been accepted; the one to Juris-M / Zotero is not ready until it's tested and working. I told them about it, and created a pull request, but said I don't expect them to apply it yet, just look at it and advise me. Also in my GitHub repositories is a "git svn" mirror of TeXmacs itself.
I'm not asking for anyone else to write the program for me... But if somebody makes a fork and writes something significant that this thing needs, I won't complain, no worries... mainly I need help understanding how to do some things that I'm having difficulty figuring out for myself through code reading and experimentation.
There's a
scheme-session.tm file in my project directory that shows that I can send and receive commands with Zotero. I'm having trouble figuring out how to do the protocol loop. When I initiate the sequence by sending,
e.g., an "addCitation"
integration command, Zotero responds with a
word processor command, to which the integration code must respond after processing it. It must stay in an IO loop with Zotero until it is issued a
Document_complete and sends the JSON null response to that. At that point it does not need to listen for connections from Zotero until another
integration command is sent by TeXmacs to Zotero. While it is in the
word processor command mode, TeXmacs is not expected to accept input from the user until Zotero is done with the sequence of operations.
By 'delayed' here I mean the Scheme "delayed" macro I see all over the GUI widget code, and in the tm-server and tm-client codes. How does this interact with "select" to wait for information to arrive on a socket port? I need help designing this IO loop so that it won't cause TeXmacs to hang, and so it will be robust in case of things like Firefox crashing or being closed by the user, etc.
The other problem that I need to solve is that I'll have to save data in the document. I think I can mostly figure that out by looking over the database code, and the bibliography handling, saving it in the aux data or with a set-binding... I think that set-binding is for setting the strings that are displayed by an in-text citation... but for some CSL citation styles, the citation belongs in a footnote. Switching styles from a "note" style to an "in-text" style should make the citations flip between being in footnotes (or end-notes; see below) or being displayed in-text at the point where the cite tag appears.
My initial experiments with using set-binding from inside TeXmacs, right there in the buffer, show that I can set a binding to a footnote, and then later recall it with get-binding. But when I define one, then move up above it and define another one, then call on get-binding in a different order, the footnote numbers are not updated to reflect the new document order... So I think what I need is delayed evaluation... as in quote-arg with later eval... Or what?
Should I use the already available 'label' -> 'reference' mechanism to display the citation text? Or is there a lower-level thing that it uses which I should use more directly? When you look at the "
scheme-session.tm" there, you'll see what it sends and what it expects to be kept, in a hidden part of the citation field, for later sending back to Zotero to re-initialize the state. I think that if I just use 'label' and 'reference' that it's not good since sometimes a citation needs to make it's own footnote, and really expanding 'reference' ought to only give back some text to display in-line, not a tree that makes a footnote. A tree with formatting, maybe...
Ideas please! I need help understanding this.