NOTE: This is a demo of one implementation, to illustrate what is possible. Visual-Meta is not tied to any specific software or operating system.
Copy & Paste to Cite
I’m writing a ‘very important document’ in ‘Author’ and I then go to ‘Reader’ where read a document downloaded from Nature.com. It had a DOI so that meant that Reader has been able to automatically added a basic Visual-Meta Appendix on opening the document the first time.
I go through the Nature document and decide that this sentence is important to what I’m doing, so I select it and copy (cmd-C) it, close the document, go back to Author and paste it.
It’s pasted as a proper citation.
I click on the citation and I can choose how it appears in the documents and add more information if I’d like, but more importantly, look at the field here at the bottom; ‘filename’, the citation knows the name of the file cited.
I now export this to PDF, with Visual-Meta of course, and view it in Reader.
Click for Reference Information
The key thing is if I now click on the citation [in hard brackets] a pop-up menu appears to show me the title, author name and date of the reference.
Click to Open Cited Document
If I click on the title of the cited document in the pop-up, it opens the actual document to the cited page.
It is able to open the document because:
The filename of the document is part of the citation, as is the page number.
I have the file in a known location.
This is how Visual-Meta augments citing, in addition to making citing robust since this works through copy and paste, there is no re-typing and no external database to be consulted.
try it!
These capabilities are already available of you to experience in the macOS Author & Reader software from The Augmented Text Company as proof of concept.