Hello everyone,
Lately I've been working on the CSL editor
project<https://csleditor.wordpress.com/about/>,
which is being managed by Jeffery Lancaster and Ian Mulvany.
We've now got a working prototype which gives an idea of the direction
we're going with this, you can try it out here:
steveridout.com/csl/visualEditor
And the code is all on github:
https://github.com/citation-style-editor/csl-editor
Thanks to recent work on citeproc-js by Frank Bennett, it allows the user
to identify the relevant part of the CSL style by hovering over the
formatted output.
I'm posting here to get some feedback, but please bear in mind it's in the
early stages and we are more interested in discussing the overall approach
rather than little bugs. To avoid too many obvious comments here are some
known problems:
- Only tested with latest Chrome and Firefox
- UI looks and feels clunky
- Tree view (jstree) drag and drop behavior is sometimes strange
- Don't have mapping from every output character to CSL node, and vice
vera, not from every CSL node to output. There's room for improvement here,
but Frank says it's difficult to achieve 100% coverage.
- Not enough example citations
- Code editor sometimes wrongly highlights nodes in red
- Comments are stripped from imported CSL files
- Should have interactive highlight when hovering over the CSL tree too
We have definite plans for the following:
- Allow user to modify the example documents, and provide a larger set of
built in examples.
- Only allow CSL schema validating styles. e.g. instead of text boxes for
attribute names, use combo boxes populated with data from the csl.rng file.
If anyone has advice on parsing the .rng with javascript please let me know.
Here are possible ideas for future work:
- Simplify/clean up tree view heirachy. At the moment it exactly maps the
CSL XML. I think there's scope for simplifying this view whilst internally
keeping the CSL structure. If we did this, we should allow switching back
and fore between the actual CSL structure.
e.g. (just thinking)
- put macros inside a 'macros' node to avoid cluttering the interface.
- try removing the leaf nodes from 'info' and 'author' and use more
friendly GUI controls in the property panel instead.
- place 'symlinks' within <text macro=""> nodes to the relevant macro
- Allow construction of styles using a database of all macros extracted
from the repository as building blocks.
- Allow user to specify desired textual output of the example documents, to
be used as unit tests for that style. This could be pre populated for users
arriving from 'search by example'. The editor would show an error and the
relevant diff if the style fails to match.
- Import and export of styles. We want an easy way to import and export
styles to and from ref managers. I think providing online storage and
resolvable URLs for all edited styles would be ideal, but is probably
beyond the scope of this project.
Look forward to hearing your comments!
Steve
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