iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim

Feature request: citations like pandoc --citeproc

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#353 opened on Jun 24, 2021

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 (4 comments) (5 reactions) (0 assignees)JavaScript (5,538 stars) (246 forks)batch import
enhancementhelp wanted

Description

This is a really great plugin. I love it.

I was hoping it would be able to replace my note-taking workflow which involves writing in pandoc markdown. When editing pandoc markdown files, it sure would be nice to have the ability to use citations from a biblatex file, so that when notes become papers it is easy to organize a bibliography.

Like say I'm editing my file myfile.md, which is

---
title: My Title
bibliography: myfile.bib
reference-section-title: References
---

# Heading
Take a look at this citation: @blachman68.

and that I have a file myfile.bib which is a biblatex file with an entry whose key is blachman68, then running pandoc like pandoc --citeproc log.md -o log.html I get an HTML file with citations, like this:

My Title

Take a look at this citation: Blachman (1968).

References

Blachman, N. 1968. “The Amount of Information That y Gives about x.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 14 (1): 27–31.

I wonder whether there is an easy way to integrate this into the plugin. Would it be possible to get it to behave like that?

Contributor guide

Tech stack
javascriptnodejshtmlcss
Domain
toolingdeveloper experience
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
3-5 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
neovim plugin development basicsJavaScript and Node.jspandoc citation syntax
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
40
Research direction
Explore the plugin's source code, particularly the markdown rendering pipeline (likely in src/). Look for existing hooks or plugins that allow custom transformations. Research whether the plugin could call an external tool like pandoc with citeproc flag, or integrate a JavaScript citation processor such as citeproc js. Consider how YAML frontmatter is parsed to extract bibliography path and reference section title. Test with a sample .bib file.