Zot2Bib

The Zot2Bib pop-up menu

Zot2Bib is a Zotero add-on that helps you combine the no-typing-required bibliographic magic of Zotero with the TeX-compatibility and Mac-like goodness of BibDesk.

With Zot2Bib, any time you get something automatically added to your Zotero library, you can also have it automatically exported to one or more BibDesk documents.

Zot2Bib is Mac-only and BibDesk-only. It’s not a generic BibTeX manager.

Update: September 2020

Zot2Bib is finally working again, after major changes to Zotero about a year ago broke it badly.

Why?

How?

Note: if you’re trying and failing to update to the latest version, remove the previously installed version and restart Zotero before continuing. If that fails, try deleting extensions.json inside /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/Zotero/Profiles/randomcharacters.default (substituting yourname and randomcharacters as appropriate), then quitting and restarting Zotero.

The preferences dialog box

Change log

Disclaimer. This extension contains only sugary goodness, but please don’t hold me responsible if anything bad should happen while you’re using it.

Problems?

Since Zot2Bib has a lot of dependencies, it breaks rather more often than I’d like. If there’s been a recent update to Firefox, Zotero, BibDesk or Mac OS X (and especially AppleScript), any of these could be causing problems. Let me know! Because Zot2Bib is hosted on mozilla.org now, you should get the appropriate update automatically.

Even better, if you’re so inclined, just fork it on Github and get hacking.

Feedback?

Please email me on george    mackerron com. Or, if you’re feeling particularly appreciative, I wouldn’t stop you buying me a pint.

Last updated: March 2021