Re: Citations, continued

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

Hi Nicolas and all,

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:

> If year, or author, are needed, I suggested to append some optional
> parameter to the key, e.g.,
>
>   [cite: pre @key:year post]

I proposed exactly this earlier in the thread, but then I came to the
conclusion that we shouldn't do it.

Conceptually, something like `@key:year' isn't a citation, but merely
indirection, because it doesn't actually provide the reader of the
rendered document enough information to look up the reference.  I think
we can cut down on the number of `citation' types that the syntax should
support if we distinguish citations from indirection like this.

Practically speaking, I think this would also be too hard to implement
correctly.  Once you can say things like "@key:title", you have to worry
about how this will be formatted in the exported document (in quotes?
italics?  etc.), and it's just not clear how to do that in general.

Instead, I suggest that Org supports this kind of indirection via other
means, perhaps by providing functions to look up the required data and
insert it directly into the text, where the author can format it as
desired.

So I would suggest that we *don't* try to capture what LaTeX does with
\citeyear, \citeauthor, etc. in the citation syntax.

Best,
Richard