Add support for CitationStyles

[koppor]

As user, I quickly want to copy and paste an entry rendered in a specified format. Either, because I want to paste a reference in a review, I work with Microsoft Word managing the references by hand, or I just quickly send around a reference to users not using BibTeX as serialization format. Currently, JabRef cannot be configured quickly to render Springer or IEEE styled entries: One has to use a combination of HTML and the formatters to get the desired result.

CitationStyles is the new way to offer rendering of bibliographic data. Currently JabRef offers following two possibilities to format BibTeX entries

• Through JabRef's formatters, which are used at the export or at the preview panel
• Through bibtex (bst) and biblatex (biblatex-styles) - when using in a latex document

I am aware that another options causes more trouble. Nevertheless, the available formats of CitationStyles is huge (over 7500) and we can't keep maintaining all of them in a JabRef / OpenOffice style variant.

Possibly, we drop JabRef's formatters? If we decide against support of CitationStyles, we should enable displaying/exporting references formatted by bibtex (and eventually biblatex). As far as I understood, JabRef offers a bibtex VM, which interprets bst files and generates text output. Meaning: We have a bibtex program implemented in Java, dont' we?

Background information

• mapping from BibTeX to CSL
• With citeproc-java it should be fairly easy to implement the feature. It also offers a bibtex importer.

[mlep]

CitationStyles looks impressive! If programming-wise, this is relevant and efficient, I vote for this feature.

[stefan-kolb]

👍

[koppor]

Comment: JabRef has a bibtex VM, which supports rendering using bst files (net.sf.jabref.bst.VM). This functionality should be used for the preview dialog, too. See also #110.

[Olifair]

I have been trying to use the visual CLS editor on the web-page to create a new style : it's horrible, really not something that the average user could easily get a hang off. But if there would be a way to just import these styles into JabRef ...

[tobiasdiez]

As discussed in #647 it would be nice to use CitationStyles in the following places:

• Entry preview
• Export to clipboard
• Export (maybe)

Moreover, we should consider providing a editor for citation styles.

[koppor]

@Olifair Sure, jabRef will offer importing any existing CitationStyle. This is the core idea of CitationStyles. IMHO, this covers 99% of all use cases.

If that does not fit your need, you can currently reconfigure the output. See http://jabref.sourceforge.net/help/PreviewHelp.php. Would that also fit your needs?