Thanks for this (I’ve been waiting a LONG time)! Overall I’d say I think the direction you’re going is good. Hopefully my survey responses are helpful.
Hi @vicente, yes I’ve seen the roadmap, but it’s been in ‘planned’ for ages, and wondered when it might actually start being developed…
Yes, I’ve seen the bibtex export and have used it. I use markdown, not LaTeX though, primarily Obsidian and IA Writer. The workflow there is a bit painful, unless you know some existing way to search for citekeys without leaving my app and have something parse the document to add formatted references at the appropriate moment. Even if the formatting wasn’t done until a final word export that could scan the citekeys, that would be preferable to having to manually replace them all.
I used to use a combination of Ulysses/Pandoc and Bibtex/Zotero with a mac automation but it wasn’t without it’s flaws. I was hoping Paperpile was pushing to something a bit more cross-platform and painless.
Nice to see fellow dual paperpile and obsidian users on the forums. Have you tried Jon Gauthier’s citations plugin- it started out as a zotero integration extension but he’s been generalizing it and I find it’s useful with paperpile’s bibtex workflow. It allows me to insert citations as cite keys, as well as create literature notes that I can paste highlights from pdfs in paperpile in markdown format.
Still no automated bibliography export though until Gauthier adds the functionality in his extension (supposedly in the works) or the paperpile team ends up implementing a cite key solution in their plugin (Also on the Roadmap- though as you note, our friendly paperpile dev team, while managing to create the best citation manager in my opinion, do tend to be slower than we would like).
Perhaps @Kyle_Marriott has additional insights? We’re discussing obsidian paperpile workflows in another thread.
Thanks @heumed I hadn’t seen that plugin, thanks - I think I must have searched for ‘referencing’ instead as that’s my go-to term. I’ll check it out!
One of the reasons I bought a subscription to PP last year was that this was on the roadmap - I much prefer the reference and file management methodology to Zotero or any of the others I’ve tried, but this aspect is a bit lacking and almost more crucial when you actually come to use the references you’ve found and annotated.
I agree- Paperpile is way more robust and pleasant to use than Zotero (Zotero is not the most robust once you get to libraries with 9000 plus citations).
Some observations using Obsidian with Citations and paperpile
While you can set the workflow to export your entire library, I find Citations to be faster and less cluttered if it only has to deal with a subset of my library. So I hae a tag #Obs that I use to tag things I want to have access to in Obsidian, with a workflow that exports papers with this tag to a bibtex sitting in google drive, which syncs it to my hard drive, with Citations pointed to read this file. It takes a few seconds between adding the tag and having the citation show up in Obsidian.
Let us know how it works out!
@vicente, any way to add the Paperpile url to the bibtex export? Zotero plugins have that option, and it allows the user to create a literature note in Obsidian based on the bibtex file with a link that takes you either to the reference or the pdf.
Yes, the roadmap isn’t particularly useful if two years later this is still only in the “planned” stage. The lack of transparency is disappointing for a paid product.
I would love to use Paperpile with Ulysses! I am happy for a simple integration in the interim by manually copying citation codes. It seems like Paperpile already allows you to copy a citation code, but when I use those in Ulysses, and export my document to word, Paperpile doesn’t recognize the citation code, so it’s effectively useless. Am I missing something with citation codes? Full integration with markdown would be amazing, but even an interim solution using manual citation codes would work for now!
Thanks all for chiming in here. I hate to disappoint but there are no concrete updates to share on this front yet. Ongoing delays on our plans/pipeline have prevented us from focusing on this matter, but rest assured that it’s still very much top of mind for us. Once we get the current big updates running stably, this and other topics will follow suit.
I hadn’t seen that plugin, thanks - I think I must have searched for ‘referencing’ instead as that’s my go-to term. I’ll check it out!