How Refnotes work for bibliography

[kookma]

Refnotes 1.0.3 of 2020

Asked by Douglas at Google Forum How Refnotes work for bibliography?

Hi Douglas,

I will hopefully work on Refnotes documentation to help newbies find their way easily. But just to answer your questions above

1. Refnotes has three small tools
   1.1. abbreviations (to insert abbreviations and create glossary table)
   1.2. footnotes (to insert numbered footnote in the tiddler body and create at the bottom of the tiddler full length footnotes)
   1.3. bibliography (to insert references, and create bibliography table)

To use it:

1. drag and drop the Refnotes to your wiki
2. install Bibtex importer (not required but automate things)

i. Normally people use some libraries to get the bibliography data. Almost any library support bibtex format, so you need to export bibliography data as .bib files
ii. import the bibliography data (.bib files to your wiki. Bibtex Importer gets the data and generates bibtex entry tiddlers with all required fields (automatically)
iii. you can now cite using simple Refnotes macro

That's all.

Refnotes plugin does not manually create bibtex entries nor encourage to do that! Bibliography data can be retrieved from a library like Google Scholar, sciencedirect.com, library of congress, ...

But as an enhancement, I can add a macro to get data from the user and all the user to create a bibtex entry manually

Hope this helps you and answers some of your questions.

[kookma]

Replied by Douglas Glenn

re-populating the user fields, ect. was a thought of the moment, but I agree with you on pre populating fields. I suggest as an alternative instead of spending the time and energy to build an interface in Refnotes. Just add an enhancement to import .bib files, and provide a short list of links to editors so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I also included on tutorial site as well so rank beginners such as myself can use to self-educate from an easy to read environment. I wouldn't recommend people to have to dig into the actual documentation. It's overkill and more likely to turn people off when they see it. I hope this helps! and thank you for taking the time to listen to me.

Tutorial:
https://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/bibtex/

Free Online BibTEX editor: https://truben.no/latex/bibtex/

Free Cross platform editors:
https://www.jabref.org (Apple OS X, Windows, Linux)
https://miktex.org/

Native Linux
Linux KDE gui: bibTEX (through the package manager for the distro)

Linux Gnome gui:
Setzer (https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-latex),
Marker (https://github.com/fabiocolacio/Marker),

Aggregate listings of multiple editors in a single place
10 Best Latex editors for 2021 : https://beebom.com/best-latex-editors/
https://botw.org/top/Computers/Software/Typesetting/TeX/BibTeX/

[rahulkashyap411]

Dear Mohammad,

I am working in academia (Physics).
I was really impressed by this plugin. It was until I saw this that I found the bibtex plugin useful. I really look forward to future improvements.
I do have a suggestion/request. I would also love to link the local pdf of references so that when I hover over the reference, I can click the link and open the pdf right away.
So far I have been using a python script to create the tiddlers from my literature folder; here is my script -- https://github.com/rahulkashyap411/tw_scripts/blob/master/update_journalArticle_tid.py

Do you think it's be possible? Is this a change that could be done at Refnote plugin or, Bibtex plugin or, perhaps both?

Looking forward for your reply.

-Rahul

[kookma]

Hi Rahul,

First part
Where are the pdfs? Have you checked the links to see if they work correctly?
I may ask to have a test tiddler and using [ext[pdf-url]] check to see the links are not broken!

The next part
the pdf links need to be added to the bibtex entry e.g add a field like bibtex-pdf-url

The last part:
As these are external links you have to use a tag like below: (see https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_a.asp)

<a href={{{ [<refTid>get[bibtex-pdf-url]] }}} target=_blank>pdf </>

[rahulkashyap411]

thanks for quick reply.

pdfs are in a local folder and when I give their paths in the tiddler main text -- [ext[pdf|bibtex-file]], it works.

I do have these two fileds in my bibtex entries from which I can get relevant details.

bibtex-file : contains relative path to pdf; want to include it like [ext[pdf|bibtex-file]]
bibtex-url: contains web address; [[url|bibtex-url]]

I checked your method; doesn't seem to work.

[kookma]

In a test tiddler put the below code and see how it works

<$tiddler tiddler="name-of-tiddler-contains-bibtex-entry ">
<a class="tc-tiddlylink-external" href={{{ [<currentTiddler>get[bibtex-pdf]] }}} 
   target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> pdf  </a>
</$tiddler>

Assuming

• name-of-tiddler-contains-bibtex-entry contains a field with url to pdf
• the pdf url is stored in bibtex-pdf

The above code works for me!

Note the bibtex-pdf is the name of pdf if it is in the same folder of wiki! or a correct url if it is on the server

[rahulkashyap411]

Many thanks for this. It's working now.
I had to include the whole thing in the displayref-onhover.

Two quick questions --

1. Can I process the string in the "bibtex-file" field to add a modification of it such as trim it and append with another string in front of it? Could you please point me towards a reference for this?
2. I also want to do the same for the page-end reference list. Which function does that? Is it $:/plugins/kookma/refnotes/macros/apa/showrefs

Thanks again,
Rahul

[kookma]

• Can I process the string in the "bibtex-file" field to add a modification of it such as trim it and append with another string in front of it? Could you please point me towards a reference for this?

Yes! one solution is to use a $vars! for example you want to add a prefix like /assets/pdfs/ to the bibtex-file field

<$vars pdfu = {{{ [<refTid>get[bibtex-pdf]addprefix[/asset/pdfs/]]] }}}>
..

• I also want to do the same for the page-end reference list. Which function does that? Is it $:/plugins/kookma/refnotes/macros/apa/showrefs

The showrefs uses templates to display the bibliographies. So open the proper template for example template for book ($:/plugins/kookma/refnotes/templates/reflist/book) or article ($:/plugins/kookma/refnotes/templates/reflist/article) and add change it as you like.