Re: Citations, continued

[Erik Hetzner <egh@e6h.org>]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 at 10:26:05 PST,
Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
>
> […]
>
> As I mentioned in the earlier thread, I think the Pandoc syntax is a
> good place to start, and I think it would be valuable to have the two
> syntaxes be compatible.  But even Pandoc's citation syntax might not be
> general enough to satisfy everyone's needs, so the first step for
> introducing citation syntax to Org should be compiling a list of all the
> things such a syntax should represent.

Hi Richard,

It would probably be worth reviewing the discussions that led to the
pandoc citation syntax:

  https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pandoc-discuss/v54VxMXtoWM/7ezu4xDSN8gJ

Of the requirements you later mentioned:

>   1) a database key that references the cited work
>   2) prefix / pre-text
>   3) suffix / post-text
>   4) references to page/chapter/section/whatever numbers and ranges.
>      This is likely part of the prefix or suffix, but might be worth
>      parsing separately for localization or link-following behavior.
>   5) a way of indicating backend-agnostic formatting properties.
>      Examples of some properties users might want to specify are:
>      - displaying only some fields (or suppressing some fields) from a
>        reference record (e.g., journal, date, author)
>      - indicating that the referenced works should *only* appear in
>        the bibliography of the exported document (equivalent of LaTeX
>        \nocite)

pandoc syntax handles 1, 2, 3, 4 (locator, which is separate from
suffix) and some of 5 (author suppression; I’m not sure the use cases
for journal/date/etc. suppression). It does not handle \nocite, but
this is something that they have discussed in the past and could
easily be supported in org-mode using, e.g. a #+NO_CITE block.
Personally I feel this covers the 99% of uses while being human
readable and writable.

I agree that citekey management is something that should be handle
separately, as this will depend on the backend (bibtex file, zotero,
etc.) Whether these citekeys are also links doesn’t really matter that
much either and could depend on the backend.

best, Erik
--
Sent from my free software system <http://fsf.org/>.