Hi all, version 0.3.4 of the plugin is out — now with BibTeX / BibLaTeX support! Find 0.3.4 in your local Obsidian installation, available within the next few hours.
Apologies for falling behind on support here — I’ll respond to some of the above issues shortly. Thanks everyone for trying out the plugin!
All changes:
Bib(La)TeX citation databases are now supported. This makes the plugin unofficially compatible with most reference managers. You can switch to the BibLaTeX format in the Citations plugin settings.
Modal dialogs now clearly display when the database is being loaded vs. when the database is ready.
Thank you for the great plugin! I have one question/request: Is that somehow possible that the [@citekey]-ref automatically links to the Literature Note?
Hi @ncraig, this is a really good point – I’ll look into this. My hunch is that most people think in this “author-first” way, and the search functionality ought to reflect that. Added to the feature roadmap!
I see I have expressed myself very unclearly. Basically, I want to be able to export my note to Latex, for which I need the [@citekey]-ref. In Obsidian, I would like the [@citekey]-ref to link to the related literature note.
I’m sorry, does this workflow make any sense at all? I’m new to all this.
@Celedor I see. I think it’d be best to just use Obsidian-native literature note links, then, so that you can benefit from all the benefits of Obsidian-style links (e.g. tracking backlinks, graph view, etc.). You’ll need to convert this Obsidian-style link during the LaTeX conversion, either via a Markdown converter before going to LaTeX (see here for an example) or otherwise.
I must say that I really like the way the Obsidian citation plugin allows for searches that are comprised of more than one word. The Zettlr citation search tool, which is also very nice, only permits a single search term. Within Zettlr, entering a space character breaks the search. The ability of Obsidian Citation plugin to have multi term searches is much appreciated. This is very useful with large libraries.
This plugin would be a great quality-of-life improvement for my workflow. But unfortunately it does not work for me with my current .bib file.
I tested it with a tiny, 30-item bib file and it works fine. But my current bib database consists of about 1800 items – I manage them in bibdesk, some have abstracts and notes and weird characters, so that could possibly cause some issues (but they all work in biblatex). Is there a way to trouble shoot where the problem comes from?
All I get currently is a little warning in the “Citation plugin settings” pane that “Unable to load citations. Please update citations plugin settings.”
So I experimented some and finally managed to load the bib file. The problem was probably due to some spurious characters in the abstract/annote fields (which I’m not using any more but used to).
The “Loaded library with n references” count is off by 3, but with so many it really doesn’t matter.
Hi @atiz, thanks for trying out the plugin! Would you mind sharing your .bib file with me (at least the entries that were causing the original problem) so I can debug?
I don’t think this forum supports attachments, but you can email me at [email protected] .
@jgauthier, I’d love to, but unfortunately don’t have that file any more – corrected the entries. Basically, I just started copy-pasting the entries into a new .bib file, trying the new one with the plugin in every step (did about 100-200 entries at a time so it wouldn’t take forever), and when it encountered a problem, I went back and tried to figure out which entry caused the issue. Once I had that, I just cut the abstract/annote fields and that usually fixed the problem. In most (if not all) of those cases there was something funky going on in those fields (some of these were imported a long time ago and I wasn’t paying attention at the time) – like ‘&’ characters and such.
(OK, edit: I’ve tried adding some of those to recreate the issue but it didn’t. Sorry I’m not a helpful trouble-shooter, I was pretty tired last night and just kind of desperate to get it work without documenting what I did.)
If I manage to recreate the problem, will let you know and will send you the file!
Thanks so much again, this is a really great plugin.
OK, thanks to Dropbox versioning, I recreated the unruly file. It’s a big file though (didn’t have the number right last time, but still above 1600 entries), will send via email.
I really like this plugin! However, I’m wondering if it might be possible to add additional info to the title or content templates besides information pertaining to the citation. For instance, I would like to prefix the title with a zettel ID (basically a timestamp from system time) similar to how I do this with the core plugin Zettelkasten Prefixer. Has anyone already figured a way to make these two plugins work in a more complementary way? If not, I wonder if this functionality could be added to the Citations plugin at some point on your roadmap.
Amazing plugin JG. I am already using it on my review paper. I was wondering if the “fuzzy search” would be available in your future updates? Right now the search function does not work properly when searching both author name + title.
@jgauthier, just in case this might be helpful in the future. The plugin could not load my bibTeX file. After x-mins of trial and error, it appears that abstracts had LaTeX elements like \mbox or \mbox{} (and probably others). I have just generated a copy of bibTeX file without abstracts and everything works now. Thanks a lot for the plugin!
What is the suggested way to handle the link to the pdf of the cited paper/book?
Basically we have 3 entities (the MarkDown note, the pdf of the cited document, the bibtex entry of such document).
To cite and have an handy link to the pdf for access convenience one could:
define a file = {} field in the corresponding bibtex entry
insert both the citation and the markdown link to the pdf in the markdown text where citation is needed
The first approach would require support from this plugin, but avoids things getting out of sync.
Or am I missing an obvious solution?
Hello, maybe it’s a very stupid question, but I am still quite illiterate on markdown so please bear with me
Is there any way to export those Zotero references from Obsidian into a Word file (having the Zotero plugin installed) as footnotes/bibliography integrated with the Zotero system? Or I can only copy/paste them as plain text?
