Dragging and Dropping Pandoc-Style Citations from BibDesk

exportPandocCitations.txt is a BibDesk template that exports pandoc-style citations.

You can use this to drag and drop citations from BibDesk into your pandoc document in your preferred editor. For example, I dragged these two citations into this README in MacVim:

[@wood2006a; @beiser1993a]

Exporting Markdown-formatted Reference Lists from BibDesk

exportMarkdownReferences.txt and exportMarkdownReferences.sh are a BibDesk template and a postprocessing shell script that together export markdown formatted reference lists.

You can use this to drag and drop formatted reference lists from BibDesk into your pandoc document in your preferred editor. For example, I option-dragged this list:

Beiser, Frederick C. 1993. *The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy From Kant To Fichte*. Harvard University Press. 

Wood, Allen W. 2006. “Fichte’s Intersubjective I.” *Inquiry* 49 (1) (Feb): 62–79.

Installation

Adding the Templates

First, follow these instructions to add the templates to BibDesk. When you are done, things should look like this:

Configuring Drag and Drop Support

I prefer to configure BibDesk to drag and drop citations, and option drag and drop formatted references. To set this up, in the "Citation" Preference Pane:

• set Default Format to Template, then set Template to exportPandocCitations.txt;
• set the Format when holding Option key to Template, then set Template to exportMarkdownReferences.txt.

So things should look like this:

Dependencies, Customization, Troubleshooting

Pandoc

The post-processing script depends on pandoc. The script looks for pandoc in $HOME/.cabal/bin and /usr/local/bin. If it is not found, you will get the following error message:

Cannot find pandoc in path. Edit the PATH variable in exportMarkdownReferences.sh

To fix this, edit line 6 of exportMarkdownReferences.sh, replacing

PATH=$HOME/.cabal/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH

with

PATH=/directory/containing/pandoc:$PATH

Other Output Formats and Styles

exportMarkdownReferences provides a model that could be used to export bibliographies in any of the styles supported by csl and any of the output formats supported by pandoc.

The post-processing script uses your default csl style. If you want it to use a different style, you will need to modify the script to pass the --csl=/path/to/example.csl option to pandoc.

Modifying the script to output other plain-text formats, like HTML or RST, is a matter of replacing -t markdown with -t html or -t RST. Modifying the script to output non-plain-text formats, like DOCX, ODT, and PDF, would require a little bit more work, but not much.

Slowness

If your bibtex file is large, there will be a noticeable delay when dragging formatted references, as it takes a moment for pandoc to parse your bibtex file and format the references. On a recent MacBook Air, with a 1307 entry bibtex file, the delay is less than a second.