Re: Citations, continued

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Stefan,

Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de> writes:

> Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:
>
>> Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:
>
>>> Citation types for extracting parts:
>>>      citeauthor, citetitle, citeyear, citedate, citeurl,
>
>> As I've said in other posts, I think maybe we should not think of
>> these as `citation' commands and thus don't need to represent them
>> in citation syntax. Instead I suggest we give authors tools to
>> insert this information into documents directly.
>
> This would render changes quite hard. Maybe I misspelled something in
> the database or I choosed the wrong reference: With above part
> extractors all I have to do at most is to replace the @key. But if
> data is copied verbatim, I have to search for all years, author names,
> titles, urls etc. Very error prone.

That's true, and I realize that's a disadvantage.  (Though I think these
are errors that, for the most part, normal proof-reading will correct
anyway.)

I know these commands are convenient, and that not having them would
introduce this class of errors, but the question is whether they are so
important that it's worth providing an equivalent for them in non-LaTeX
backends.  For my part, it seems like the convenience is not worth the
effort that would be required to make the exporter handle these
correctly in general.  (For example, it seems the exporter would then
have to worry about things like quoting and emphasizing document titles
-- which means worrying about context, document type, locale and
language, quotation styles, etc.)  But maybe I'm wrong; can you make the
case that it is indeed worth it?

Best,
Richard