- So as far as I see it, āFor many academic purposesā, you need to get the reference into a form where it is clear what each element is. That is you are able to āaddress the componentsā, then once this is true it is āeasyā to present it in multiple forms.
The common approach would be to convert any of the different incoming formats to a single lossless format, then provide an option to transform, or render it in a particular format.
- How do you identify the incoming format? I expect it comes from a source that uses a specific format and possibly documents it as such.
- You may then have a macro (or other form) that you provide the text to, that tells us what format it arrived in, and once tokenised what format you want it viewed as (by default a wiki standard output regardless of the input)
What if we provide a popup modal which presented the text and its best guess in different forms, on selecting one it encodes this as the source format, then uses the wiki standard to display it?
Its interesting the example it gives, because Wikipedia source uses a markdown standard. We would be better having a parser for it, as we do markdown.
Not withstanding that there, are many cases where only the html is available.
A minor correction. Wikipedia does not use Markdown. It uses itās own format it callsā¦ wait for itā¦ wikitext.
Tomato/tomato but thanks for the clarification 