Re: Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr>]

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

> Actually, your post has convinced me that it may be worth allowing some
> explicit name for a type in the [cite: ...] part of the syntax, although
> I am still leery about what this would mean for non-LaTeX backends.

Each back-end can decide to use it or simply ignore it. Also [cite:...]
should be equivalent to [cite:default: ...], for some value of "default"
decided by the target back-end.

> I did not appreciate before that switching from one type to another is
> something you probably want to be able to do really easily, like with
> query-replace, even if you are making use of the other parts of the
> syntax to express distinctions like in-text vs. parenthetical
> citations.
>
> So, two questions for the group:
>
> 1) Is it worth allowing a name for a user-defined type in the [cite: ...]
> part, or is it OK to confine user-defined types to the second part
> (like: [cite: ...] %%(:type foo) or [cite: ...]{:type foo})?

Expecting subtype in the header doesn't add a limitation to pre or post
text.

Moreover [cite: ...]{...} syntax really makes sense if it is the
equivalent to #+attr_... keywords, so we can generalize it to links. As
a consequence, {...} should include a reference to back-end. E.g.,

  [cite:...]{latex :color pink}

> 2) If a user-defined type can go in the [cite: ...] part, where should
> it go?  Nicolas has suggested:
>
>   [cite:subtype ...]
>
> or 
>
>   [cite:subtype: ...]
>
> I would personally (aesthetically, don't ask me why) prefer:
>
>   [cite/subtype: ...]
>
> or
>
>   [cite|subtype: ...]
>
> But maybe there are other options I haven't thought of.

I'm fine with any of these, although the latter looks less nice to me.


Regards,