For those of you who are interested in the BibTeX plugin, please fill out this short survey to help me make some design decisions regarding the development of the plugin.
Have fun 
I don't understand the first question. Should the size include pdf attachments?
BibTex files are project-specific for me (e.g. when writing a research paper) and only contain the metadata of the references used for a given project. The size is usually below 100 kB.
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No, don't include PDF attachments. Also, just write the average size of the file when doing a new research project. It does not need to be accurate; just an upper bound would suffice.
I think this is enough responses for now. Here's the data:
Now it's time to draw some conclusions:
- I've decided that being as compatible with Zotero as possible is a top priority. This is due to the fact that most people have voted for Zotero as their primary Reference Management tool.
- It seems like there's a diversity in the size of BibTeX files used by the users, so I won't draw any decisive conclusions for the time being; let's leave that to a later time. The purpose behind this question was to decide if it's worth it to account for large BibTeX libraries (e.g more than 1 GB) since they will be difficult to handle without having a performance drop.
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Will they though? It's probably worth trying anyway with a 1GB file and see how it performs. Maybe it's fast enough and then you can cache the result to memory.
If it turns out large files are a problem you still need to handle it by displaying an error, or setting a file size limit, etc.
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That makes sense, and chances are if it's compatible with Zotero it will be compatible with other tools too.
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For starters, I will do exactly that.
I will set a file size limit and display an error message when the limit is exceeded.
Will there be a work around if your citation file is too big and raises an error or is it just a kind of a "tough luck, cite less" situation?
It will raise an error to notify the user.
Why does it need to raise an error? Can't it just work albeit slowly?
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Loading large files into memory can cause a memory overflow on some devices. Assuming that you have apps other than Joplin running in the background.
It's not a unique scenario though, e.g. I suspect something similar will happen if someone tries to attach a huge image.
What I'm getting at is maybe it's best to just allow any file size and let users deal with consequences if the file is too big.
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Ok, got it.