Re: [O] Some projects

[Matt Price]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Matt Lundin <address@hidden> wrote:

Matt Price <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Rasmus <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>     Aaron Ecay <address@hidden> writes:
>
>     Indeed. I guess this is what they use:
>
>     https://github.com/zotero/citeproc-node
>
>     It also looks rather complex...
>
>
> FWIW, I just tried installing this on my Arch system, but it doesn't
> work with node 0.12, and I am currently unable to switch to io.js due
> to dependencies of several other projects. I guess tools like NVM can
> help with this situation, but I worry that node is currently a moving
> target and might lead to lots of platform-dependent buggy behaviour.

Testing it now... Works fine on my Arch system. Arch's current nodejs is
4.2. As I understand it, io.js has been merged back into node 4.+

upgraded from 0.12, and it works fine.  My problem before was that some important npm packages were still incompatible with node 4.2; it may be that that's no longer an issue, and I spoke too soon. 
 

The citeproc-node server itself is not very complex. It's just a node
wrapper around citeproc-js. The big limitation, it seems to me, is that
it only accepts a json format as input. Also it seems to use html markup
in all its output formats.

That does seem to be an issue, but I bet it wouldn't be too hard to fix.  Currently outputformat is hardcoded on line 94 of lib/citeServer.js; I'm a little slow at reading JS but I think replacing line 259 with a switch statement analogous to the one for responseformat at line 291 would allow one to use the full capacities of citeproc.js.  I think the best route would probably be to submit a patch to citeproc.js adding an org-mode output format, propagating that up to citeproc-node, submitting a second patch to citeproc-node, and then writing the org-internal functions properly.  We might also want to add an additional responseformat option. 

It might take a month or two to get all those changes accepted, but we could probably do the org-mode development simultaneously, and it would be worth the wait to have a stable solution.  My experience with the citeproc-js maintainer is that he is very helpful and responsive to feature requests. 

I am a slow coder but would be happy to invest some time in this if it's the direction the community wants to go in.  Adding a new output format to citeproc-js is not that complex; see https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/src/tip/src/formats.js?fileviewer=file-view-default

Though published by the Zotero programmers, citeproc-node, I believe, is
distinct from the citeproc-js implementation in Zotero, which is a XUL
application.

I think that's right.  If we could avoid dependencies on Zotero that would be good; it is a pretty substantial program, takes up a significant amount of RAM at runtime, and relies on a GUI environment, which neither emacs nor pandoc does.  

 

Matt