Re: Org citations, CSL and citeproc-el

[Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com>]

This is exciting news, and I look forward to trying it out.

Regarding syntax:

1. A couple of years back, there was an active discussion on this list to
flesh out a native citation syntax for Org. I fell off the discussion,
but I think it resulted in a non-link-based, feature-rich syntax spec,
but not much code to make use of it. Perhaps someone could comment?

2. Not many people liked my proposal: a link-based syntax similar to yours
but also including author and date in the link description. The idea was
to have descriptions that are both (1) human-readable even though the
citekeys are hidden away in the link path and (2) machine-readable to
determine the form of the citation (parenthetical or not, date-only or
not, etc.). I have used one to work with Zotero, and have a simple
parser for it, if you're interested in pursuing something similar.

Yours,
Christian

Simonyi András writes:

> Dear List Members,
>
> a few days ago I've released the first public version of citeproc-el
> (https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-el), a CSL 1.01 citation
> processor library for Emacs. Since the main motivation of my work was to
> contribute to org-mode's citation rendering I also implemented a "proof
> of concept" add-on to org-ref that uses citeproc-el to render org-ref
> citation links for non-LaTeX (and optionally even LaTeX) export backends
> (see https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-orgref).
>
> Both packages are in a relatively early stage of their development so
> I'd be grateful to receive any feedback on them. In particular, in
> citeproc-orgref I had to abuse the cite link descriptions to an even
> greater degree than they were by org-ref to accommodate the full CSL
> representation of citations (citations consist of cites and each cite
> can have a prefix, postfix and a locator). The resulting link syntax is
> rather cumbersome so I'd like to ask your opinion about introducing an
> alternative org-mode citation syntax that handles all of these elements.
> One option would be to use something very similar to pandoc's citation
> syntax (which I tried to follow as much as possible in the cite link
> descriptions of citeproc-orgref).
>
> A more general question I'd like to raise how (or whether) you see
> citeproc-el's (and CSL's) potential place in the org-mode ecosystem.
> There are a lot of directions which the further development could take
> (BibLaTeX support, citeproc-YAML bibliographies, CSL editing and CSL
> extensions etc.) and I'd be grateful to receive your input on which ones
> I should focus on.
>
> thanks in advance & best wishes,
>
> András Simonyi