Document how to use Zotero integrations (Quarto, PandocCiter)

[Robinlovelace]

This is an essential feature for using the IDE for reproducible academic research report and paper writing. There's a good discussion of this here and the feature was implemented in Visual Editor mode: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-vscode/issues/18

However, as @e-kotov has said, a feature-complete IDE for reproducible writing should have:

• [ ] Ability to add citations in source editor mode (e.g. with @ symbol to trigger the interface and a shortcut)
• [x] Ability to add citations in the Visual Editor, as the quarto plugin for VS Code already does (and RStudio does also I believe)

[e-kotov]

This was also requested here https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/9173 , but probably should have been addressed elsewhere.

The citation inserting mechanism in Visual Editor is great, but switching to the editing mode sometimes reformats the (q/r)md file, which is not always desirable.

In my opinion, perhaps adding citations with @ in source mode is overkill, but the Insert Citation dialog window (the one that's available in the Visual Editor) should be at least available through the Positron's commands palette.

[Robinlovelace]

One approach: make use of existing plugins. Pandoc Citer seems to support .qmd: https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter/issues/30

Maybe contributing upstream to that plugin and having it in the default install could be an option?

[juliasilge]

We do already bundle the Quarto VS Code extension with Positron, so the support available in that extension will already be available.

PandocCiter is available on OpenVSX so we would expect that to work well in Positron.

[Robinlovelace]

We do already bundle the Quarto VS Code extension with Positron, so the support available in that extension will already be available.

That's great news! I saw the repo was archived, is the code now part of this repo?

I've updated the original post in any case, sounds like only the source code mode needs native Zotero support, or docs pointing towards tested solutions like PandocCiter, to fix this issue.

[juliasilge]

You can find the repo that includes the Quarto VS Code extension here: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto

[Robinlovelace]

Polite nudge on this: I'm planning a talk on reproducible repos for research and was hoping to mention Posit as an option, getting this tied down, even with "this is probably the best way of doing it here" without any official docs could be enough. Thanks!

[juliasilge]

Sure thing @Robinlovelace! If you want to talk about Positron in the context of reproducible research, I would vote for saying Positron provides folks a data science IDE that can be extended/customized for their specific needs, for example to use pandocciter when appropriate. I would also encourage highlighting that Positron is a very new IDE available for beta testing (if folks are interested in experimenting with it, we welcome their feedback!).