Citation syntax: now supported in Pandoc

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

Hi everyone,

With Org 9.0 out, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the issue
of citation syntax.  Not much has happened with this recently, but I do
have one bit of progress to report:

About six months ago, Albert Krewinkel, who maintains the support for Org
syntax in Pandoc [1], wrote to me about supporting the citation syntax
we discussed previously, and that is partially implemented in
the wip-cite branch.  You can see examples of the syntax at [2].

Albert dove in, and was able to quickly add support for the syntax to
Pandoc's Org reader.  This support has been merged into released
versions of Pandoc.  Albert actually announced this a few months ago on
Reddit [3], but it looks like he did not email this list.

I finally got a chance to check out his work yesterday.  I converted one
citation-heavy chapter of my dissertation to use the new syntax, and
tested out Pandoc's support, with a couple of different CSL stylesheets,
including a note-based style.  It works great.  Thanks, Albert, for your
hard work!

There are some minor issues that probably need more discussion after
real-world use (like whether/when a conjunction should be inserted
automatically before the last reference in a multi-cite citation).  But
as far as I can tell, Albert has correctly implemented everything we
actually discussed and agreed on.

In short, Pandoc now has support for Org citation syntax, and that
support is fully integrated with Pandoc's citation processing
capabilities.  So there is now at least one "real" (non-prototype)
solution for processing Org citations via CSL, with output to HTML,
LaTeX, ODT, .docx, and the other formats that Pandoc supports.

This makes it a lot easier for people to test out the syntax in the real
world, so I encourage you to do so, and report back on what you find!

Best,
Richard

[1] http://pandoc.org/
[2] https://github.com/wyleyr/org-citeproc/blob/master/tests/testdoc.org
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/orgmode/comments/4tes4x/ann_pandoc_v1172_has_been_released_it_now/