Re: Citations, continued

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:

> Hi Rasmus and all,
>
> Thanks for your comments!
>
> Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:
>>> #+BEGIN_QUOTE
>>> [See @Doe99, pp. 34--45; also @Doe00:year, section 6] 
>>>
>>> [See their article in @Doe99:journal:year.] 
>>> #+END_QUOTE
>>
>> First, I think we should use @key for inline and (@key) for parenthesis
>> expressions.  This give us two short keys.  [@Key ⋯] can be reserved for
>> complicated references.
>
> That sounds fine to me.  I think you may be using `inline' differently
> than me, though: do you mean `author's name appears in the text (not in
> parentheses)'?  (I was using it to talk about where the citation
> definition appears in the document, not where the author's name appears
> relative to parentheses.)

I applied my usecase which is \textcite and \parentcite.  The point it
that you have got two types of citations at hand: could be \textcite and
\footcite if you care more for that.

>> I don't like "@Doe99:journal:year".  It's too unlike existing syntax.
>
> I agree it's a little clunky, but I think most of the time there would
> just be one selector.  I was thinking of this on analogy with heading
> properties and tags...is there a better existing syntax to refer to a
> property value?

Perhaps it's similar to properties and tags.  I have key values in mind
which are either key:value or :key value as in OPTIONS lines and
MY_KEYWORD lines...  Perhaps it is not the correct reference.

>> Rather, I'd just introduce types as hinted previously, [@Doe99 :type
>> my-journal-year-type].  Org can provide as many predefined :type as we
>> care for, and let the user define the rest as necessary.
>
> I don't like this, because it seems like a lot more work for me as a
> user to achieve something that should be simple, and it trades 
> specifying /what/ data I want for describing it more indirectly.
>
> Suppose I'm writing a document, and I know I just want to reference the
> journal and year of a particular publication, in that order.  Being a
> studious keeper of my org-bibtex database, I already know that these
> fields are called "journal" and "year".  But if, in addition to
> reference database field names, I have to remember names for /types/ of
> /combinations/ of field names, that's too much.  

Reftex will do this for you.

> I'll end up taking endless trips to the manual to figure out which type
> I need in this case.  Do I need :type journal-before-year? :type
> journal-and-year?  etc.  This feels a bit too much like having to
> remember (or look up) all the different LaTeX citation commands.

Might be true.  I don't expect that problem much.

> What about just separating the field names off, as keys?  Like:
>
> [See Doe's review @Doe99 :journal :year]

That looks much better ("Org-ish"), though it implies

     [See Doe's review @Doe99 :journal nil :year nil]

Which is kind of the opposite of the desired...  Or perhaps I'm just
misreading it.

>>> When specific fields are requested, ONLY data from those fields should
>>> appear in the exported document.  Backends would choose how to export
>>> these citations based on the selected fields.
>>
>> What happens when a field is undefined?
>
> I guess I would suggest the same thing as happens in LaTeX: you get a
> nice, bold "??" in the output where the missing data should be. 

Or better, throw an error.

>> I think R-markdown uses something like [-@Smith79].  Again, I don't like
>> the [@key:nocite].
>
> Doesn't [-@Smith79] mean something different, namely, "cite @Smith79
> without the author name"?  It produces output like: "(1979)".

Thanks for the clarification.


>>> #+BEGIN_QUOTE
>>>     * Citations
>>>
>>>     #+ATTR_LATEX: :command citet
>>>     #+ATTR_HTML: :class my-citation
>>>     [cite:1] See @Doe99, pp. 34--45; @Foobar2000, ch.1.
>>> #+END_QUOTE
>>
>> Why not.  Since footnote-definition is a greater element it /does/ take
>> affiliated keywords, but I have never seen this used.
>
> Right, that's the point here...(were you disagreeing?)

No.

>> For inline maybe something like this:
>>     [@Key :type_html my-citation :type_latex citet] 
>
> Actually, this is a lot like the syntax I was thinking about for the
> inline case, but in the end I thought it was too complicated and new to
> be worth it, when the #+ATTR_BACKEND syntax will already work for the
> out-of-line case.  I'm not opposed to something like this in principle,
> but I really think we should try to keep the inline case very simple and
> obvious to use, even if that means restricting its expressiveness a bit.

The thing is it makes it very readable and obvious.  You can fix display
issues separately if you want.

>> From experience, the biblatex model of separating the loading of files,
>> styles and printing into different commands is a great advantage.
>
> OK.  I'd even be happy with
>
> #+BIBLIOGRAPHY:
> #+BIBLIGRAPHY_STYLE:
> #+PRINT_BIBLIOGRAPHY:
>
> where the first could be specified as many times as desired, to indicate
> external reference databases.

Yeah, I had those in an earlier draft.  My only issue is
that #+PRINT_BIBLIOGRAPHY: is awkward if nothing comes after the ':'.

>>> The point of specifying the style and locale as part of
>>> the #+BIBLIOGRAPHY definition is for compatibility with both LaTeX and
>>> Citation Style Language bibliography and citation formatting.
>>
>> Local is defined by #+LANGUAGE.  AFAIK, Org doesn't support many
>> languages.  E.g. here's the definition of LANGUAGE in ox.el:
>>
>> (:language "LANGUAGE" nil org-export-default-language t)
>
> Ah, OK, I didn't know about #+LANGUAGE.  Is there any reason why the
> locale of the bibliography might be different than the locale of the
> document?  (I'm monolingual, I'm afraid, so I doubt I could think of one
> if there were...)

AFAIK, #+LANGUAGE is a single element, e.g. 'en' or 'de'.  With ox-latex
you can load several languages via babel and org-latex-packages-alist.
Loading locals via other mechanism seems like a bug.

—Rasmus

-- 
With monopolies the cake is a lie!