Zotero Integration – Import Templates?

[Feralflora]

I’m glad you like it, let me know how the List Callouts work out for you!

@tophee

So when you say nothing is jumping around, are you referring to the behaviour of ordinary callouts, when you have to click into the callout to be able to edit it but since that reveal’s hidden characters, things “jump around”.

Exactly. No hidden markdown formatting appears when you go to edit a list item, which was also one of the reasons I wanted a list rather than callouts. Now that I’ve also gotten rid of the ==highlights==, the editing experience is very fluid.

Regarding the authors, I hadn’t really given it much thought, because most of my sources are journal articles where there only are authors. But I also have items like books, so I’m thankful for your snippet there and will test it out.

@tophee

When you say chronogical it sounds like “in the order the annotations were made”, but I assume you mean “in the sequential order they appear in the text”, right?

Right, that was an imprecision. I was thinking of changing it, but was unsure how. Sequential is exactly right.

@tophee

Could this have been the reason? Stability?

Yes, lack of stability / reliability is a likely reason. I detailed why I was going back to ZI from OZ on Discord:

Based on my recent experiences, I would actually caution against using AidenLX’s Obsidian-Zotero plugin right now over MgMeyers’ Zotero Integration, because there are several substantial bugs in the latest version:

• YAML is not imported at all if you try to have authors or creators as YAML fields 1.0.3 failed to render YAML · Issue #130 · PKM-er/obsidian-zotlit · GitHub
• Image or area highlights / excerpts don’t work Image Excerpt does not automatically store image · Issue #113 · PKM-er/obsidian-zotlit · GitHub
• Long titles get broken apart by four spaces in the YAML [BUG] Tabs (four spaces) get inserted into the yaml titles of articles · Issue #139 · PKM-er/obsidian-zotlit · GitHub
• YAML title formatting is inconsistent [BUG] Title formatting is inconsistent · Issue #140 · PKM-er/obsidian-zotlit · GitHub
  - Sometimes, they are surrounded by quotation marks, sometimes not.

It’s just too unreliable and buggy, and unfortunately, the speed of the plugin can’t outweigh that. I hope to return to it soon when these bugs have been resolved, but until then, I will try Zotero Integration again.

All of the above still applies.

@tophee

Have you tried it? [bibnotes]

Yeah, I have used Bibnotes formatter quite a lot in the past. It has a lot of potential, and it was quite fast. But recently, it’s been unusable for me due to formatting bugs. I cannot get formatting of the various elements like comments and highlights correct due to these bugs. It’s not abandoned, but bug resolution has been prohibitively slow for me.

One of its main appeals to me was the complex transformation rules you could make, like converting certain comments to tasks. But, as my template demonstrates, that is also possible with ZI.

@tophee

My main issue with the zotero integration plugin is that it tends to be slow and sonetimes hangs,

True. I compared ZI and OZ over in my thread with Obsidian-Zotero templates, mainly noting the slowness and also the annoying Zotero picker, which often opens in the background:

Overall, there are some reliability, templating and feature implementation issues when using custom templates with the Obsidian-Zotero plugin, compared to Zotero Integration, but the result is still pretty satisfactory. The main pro is the speed. In my experience, searching for and importing a literature note is probably 10x faster using Obsidian-Zotero compared to Zotero Integration. Search and import speed is a noted issue with Zotero Integration . However, Obsidian-Zotero does offer an API with the latest release which allows other plugins to access the Zotero database through it, so that could be a solution there. Obsidian-Zotero also overcomes the annoyance of the native Zotero citation picker, which most often appears in the background rather than displaying over Obsidian.

Note: This was written before I decided to go back to ZI for the time being, as the aforementioned bugs were later introduced in OZ. I actually find ZI to be much more tolerable now, speed-wise.