citation support?

[stevepowell99]

will you be adding support for citations e.g. like http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demo/example19/Citations.html? It is hard to imagine writing a scientific book without citation support. Exciting package by the way, thanks.

[btwael]

Maybe you should use this Markdown syntax

> Your citation

and the result will be like this:

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music, but I do know that I get most joy in life out of my violin.

The citation in the example is an Einstein's quote
There an usage of this syntax in this page http://samypesse.github.io/How-to-Make-a-Computer-Operating-System/Chapter-1/README.html that use GitBook

I Hope that this comment help you..

[stevepowell99]

Oh sorry if I wasn't clear. By citation, I didn't mean inset quotes. I meant bibliography citation, like "Powell (2000)" in the text, usually with a list of references in the end.

[jbryer]

This article might be a nice place to begin thinking about this: http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/06/19/citations-in-scholarly-markdown/
This would be a great feature to have. Something as easy as Bibtex.

[pkra]

This discussion could be of interest benweet/stackedit#20

[btwael]

Maybe this issue should be sent to Markdown developers or Marked developers, Marked is used by Gitbook to render Markdown, to integrate this feature to Markdown and to Gitbook after...

[stevepowell99]

Ah right, so gitbook uses marked and marked does not support citations - and they might not want to if their aim is speed and efficiency. Though see markedjs/marked#35. But marked does support footnotes, which are simpler, but even footnotes aren't working for me in gitbook. So this does not work at the moment:

Here is some text containing a footnote.¹

Footnotes

1. Here is the text of the footnote itself. ↩

[maxheld83]

Just want to chime in that this (along with some other scholarly typesetting niceties academic are used to from LaTeX) is really important to make this a viable product to scientists.
I think I might have been waiting for something like gitbook to come along for years, just didn't know it yet.

Still, this might need some more features to work.

[stevepowell99]

I agree with maxheld83. But for now, it would be great to get even footnotes / endnotes working as they are a markdown standard and should be pretty easy, and they could be hacked to make a kind of substitute for proper citations.

[jbryer]

If you are using R and/or R Markdown, I have written a package (Rgitbook original name I know) that uses the knitcitations package to handle references. I will load a .bib file anywhere in your project and pass a bib object that you can use to cite. Therefore there is one references page that you can link anywhere in your project.

For now you just use inline knit code and call the citep or citet functions. However, I would like to use the pandoc format of [@citeLabel] instead but since my regular expression skills are limited, it will take me longer to get it working.

Admittedly this isn't the most elegant solution, but seems to work for me.

[maxheld83]

that's a great starter @jbryer thanks for the pointer.

[stevepowell99]

@jbryer Yes I already installed Rgitbook (in fact I found out about gitbook via your post on R-bloggers) and am finding it useful. And yes, the citation support is very useful for R users.
But the great thing about gitbook for me is the easy editor, it makes writing fun for less technical projects, and Rgitbook is a separate approach.
Still thinking that citations support, or even working footnotes, would be great for gitbook.

[yonkeltron]

+1 for citations. As another scientist, I'd love to use this in an upcoming write up heavy on data structures and visualization but right now it looks like I can't without citation/bibliography support.

[stevepowell99]

For now I am just using the following hack so I can write my book with gitbook but use citations and r code too: Create a gitbook repository and edit as usual, but use r code blocks and inline quotes like r citet(bib[["kellogg_logic_2004"]]) . Then run a script which:

1. removes the target folder book_out
2. copies the repository as a new folder book_out, renaming the .md files as .Rmd
3. runs buildGitbook(). Only takes a couple of seconds.

This is the two-line R script, script.R
system("rm /path/to/book_out -R; cp -f /path/to/book /path/to/book_out -R; find /path/to/book_out -type f -exec rename 's/md/Rmd/' '{}' ;")
buildGitbook(source.dir = "/path/to/book",out.dir = "/path/to/book_out")

then I just run R CMD BATCH script.R in a terminal.

Really hacky but it works.

[maxheld83]

+1, epic one.
Any news from @GitbookIO on this?