Citations (bibtex?) support

[willdurand]

Purpose

The idea is to support BibTeX for scientific references.

Features

• Proof of Concept
• Write a lib to parse and format bibtex content
• Write a markdown-it plugin to enhance the fence block parser
• Write tests for the markdown-it plugin
• Write tests for the lib
• Make it pretty in the Preview panel

See below for screenshots.

[willdurand]

I have a working prototype. Let's see what we want to do though because it only supports rendering bibtex entries like this:

@article{author16, ...} 

[jmaupetit]

As mentioned in #16 (see this comment), I know it won't be easy, but adding citations as footnotes would be nice.

[willdurand]

Well, supporting bibtex preview would already be nice. My idea is to allow the use of some bibtex references, but I will not rewrite Overleaf :-)

There is no lib for formatting bibtex files correctly in javascript, so I have to write this lib first :-(

Then, I have to test the markdown-it plugin I wrote for rendering bibtex content. I chose this format:

 ```cite
 bibtex content goes here
 ```

Then, I will try to support the [@citation_key] notation to link citation keys in the text with bibtex entries. After that, it should be possible to reuse the principle of footnotes, but as I said, I don't really use them, so I am not sure to spend time on it.

Here are a few screenshots:

[jmaupetit]

Then, I will try to support the [@citation_key] notation to link citation keys in the text with bibtex entries.

This is precisely what I am talking about: citation keys (e.g. hunter_ebi_2014) should be clickable; clicking on a key should scroll down to the rendered BibTeX entry (just like footnotes).

[willdurand]

Not exactly, I should have written "wire" instead of "link". Example: [@hunter_ebi_2014] should render (Hunter et al., 2014) in the preview.

[jmaupetit]

Ok then. Let's consider this issue as the first step of adding bibliography support in Monod and forget about footnote-like behavior.

[willdurand]

Current status:

[willdurand]

So, it uses regular fence blocks so that rendering in GitHub or whatever GFM-compliant editor should still render something in a decent way:

I just added a visual tip for invalid references (i.e. not found in any bibtex entries):

[willdurand]

Issue transformed into a PR 🎉

[willdurand]

Note for myself: maybe I could avoid to parse the content twice (here and below in the fence block parser)