Generate Code to Use with Other Text Editors

[Kerim]

I love PaperPile and I’m willing to work on documents in Google Docs just to use PaperPile. However, my early drafts are mostly done in a plain text editor. Is there any way I could generate a code in PaperPile which I could copy and paste into these documents such that when I uploaded the final version to Google Docs to generate my bibliography it could scan and convert the in-text citation code to its own format? I know other bibliographic managers like Sente have this feature, looking for text of the format “{Smith 2007}" and converting it automatically. Having something like this in PaperPile would allow me much greater flexibility in how I work (especially if the code was as as simple as this, as I could often guess what it would be without having to go to the app).

(Forgive me if this is a duplicate request. I think I made a similar request a long time ago, but I couldn’t find it. I also see two threads about scanning plain text documents, but those seem to be about converting bibliographies, not in-text citations.)

[stefan]

That’s a useful feature and I can relate to the use case using a text editor for writing. Such a mechanism would make it possible to cite in pretty much every text editor or authoring system.

We already have unique citation identifiers for every item your library and it would also be possible to use a more generic “smart match” way to match dois/pmids or just generic author/date pairs like {Do 2003}.

It’s definitely something I’d like to see implemented at some point. Like for so many other good ideas, it’s just a matter of resources and I can’t tell if/when it will happen.

[Kerim]

Cool. When/if you do get around to looking at this feature I highly recommend looking at Sente’s implementation which allows code for page numbers and appending text to the citation. It is the thing I miss most about Sente now that I’ve switched to PaperPile.