Re: wip-cite status question and feedback

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@uni-tuebingen.de>]

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com> writes:

>> > My understanding, though, is that org "cite" would default to your
>> > last example I quote above (in natibib, citep); that there's no need
>> > for a dedicated "cite/paren" command, either reserved or not.
>>
>> Not necessarily. "cite" means default value, whatever that is. It could,
>> for example, mean: "cite/text" for every citation, if that is what you
>> use the most. In that case, "cite/paren" is necessary, to override it
>> locally. It could also be, e.g., "cite/footnote", then both "cite/text"
>> and "cite/paren" could be of some use. That was suggested by Richard
>> Lawrence in this thread, if my memory serves me right.
>>
>> Does that make sense?
>
> I think so. I'll defer to Richard on this, since he was making this point.

Sorry to take so long to reply. The point I made earlier was that, as
far as I understand, the choice of CSL stylesheet is the main factor
determining how a given citation gets rendered into the output (assuming
you process citations with CSL). So yes, it makes sense to have "cite"
mean default value as determined by the choice of stylesheet.

I've been skimming the CSL documentation, and I'm realizing that I
actually don't have a very good understanding of how these different
types of commands would be represented at the level of a CSL processor.

Bruce, is it possible to have a CSL stylesheet that would be able to
accommodate both e.g. "cite/paren" and "cite/footnote" in the same
document? Can a stylesheet support an arbitrary numbers of different
citation types like this, and can a CSL processor choose among those
types based on their *names*?

If so, then I think Nicolas' proposal to have "cite" mean default and
make non-default citations available as "cite/xxx" makes sense
(especially with the other syntax supporting suppress-author, etc.).

If not, then the "cite/xxx" syntax makes less sense to me; it just sort
of looks like a different way of writing BibLaTeX commands, and will be
hard to support when LaTeX is not the output format. I would be hesitant
in that case to make "cite/xxx" the standard way to express "this
citation should be rendered in manner xxx, instead of the default".

Best,
Richard