Ability to create "Zettelkasten"-notetitle

[jrennstich]

First of all THANK YOU so much for providing this wonderful tool! I am now able to maintain a working "Zettelkasten" system with Zotero and Devonthink 3 without yet another tool for organizing notes.

One feature I would really like to automate is to create a unique ID for each note based on the now common notation of YYYMMMDDHHMM. This would go into the <prefix> of the file export setup. Maybe this is already possible but I wasn't able to work out, how to set up a placeholder/variable in the prefix field.

Again, thanks so much for this amazing Zotero-plugin!

[tarahmarie]

I found this issue by searching for the same thing; I would love this. It's the only barrier between a perfect markdown export to Zettlr, Obsidian, etc, for me. If you're able to point to the location this is generated, I am happy to provide an option or work on this.

[elviskahoro]

Have you tried setting MDNotes to use the citation key as the title? And then including the YYYYMMDDHHMM in BIBTEX's citation key format?

[elviskahoro]

1. Set "Use the item's citekey as title?" to true in MDNotes preferences.

2. In BibTex prefernces for Citation Key Format include this label: [Date:format-date=%Y%m%d%H%M%S] note: I still have seconds included but you can remove this.

3. Add the other information you want to the bibtex citation key format: [Date:format-date=%Y%m%d%H%M%S] - [auth:lower] - [other_tags]

4. List of labels you can use in your citation keys are located here: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/citing/

[elviskahoro]

@jrennstich @tarahmarie Can you let me know if it's working? And then we can probably close this.

[tarahmarie]

For lack of this feature I'd deleted MD Notes; let me try again this week and see if it works for me...will report back.

[argenos]

@elviskahoro thanks for the workaround! I do have plans to add a wider support of dates in the file names and on templates, but unfortunately I haven't had time to sit down and work on mdnotes these past months. Happy to keep the issue open until I can implement this natively.

[elviskahoro]

If you're going to leave it open, then this issue should be low priority. Betterbib supports so much configuration for the citation key, why do redundant work? I'll try to work on some issues myself! Thanks again for mdnotes

[tarahmarie]

I'm trying this, and what's happening is that the syntax of the suggested date prefix is the date of the article publication and not of the current datetime as is best Zettelkasten practice. Now, even if I was going to solve that problem, the issue would be that the note wouldn't be automatically created upon adding the Zotero item--or that I can't add the note with a different datetime than either the article's publication date or the date I added it to Zotero. Is there any way to create a new datetime stamp in the moment I'm exporting the note? Without that, I still have to go and hand-edit the filenames.

[elviskahoro]

I don't think this is do able through better bib tex. The closest, most viable solution I could come up with is using extra tag via bibtex like they mention:

"extra: A pseudo-field from the extra field. eg if you have Original date: 1970 in your extra field, you can get it as [extra=originalDate], or tex.shortauthor: APA which you could get with [extra=tex.shortauthor]. Any tex. field will be picked up, the other fields can be selected from this list of key names."

But this will still require you to manually edit / write the date.