Re: Citations, continued

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

Hi Nicolas,

I just want to say thanks for continuing the conversation, by the way:
I know this thread has gotten long, but I'm glad people are still
paying attention, and Nicolas, your opinion counts for a lot.

On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> wrote:

> What about the following set?
>
>  bold code entity italic latex-fragment line-break strike-through
>  subscript superscript underline superscript

That would work fine for me in prefixes and suffixes.

> To be clear, much like Rasmus, I don't like much in-text citations
> syntax above. Actually, I would suggest to mimic footnotes, and handle
> in-text citations with the same syntax as named footnotes.
>
> Using the example from Erik Hetzner in the same thread, what about:
>
>   1. [cite:@item1] says blah.
>   2. [cite:@item1: p. 30] says blah.
>   3. [cite:@item1: p. 30, with suffix] says blah.
>   4. [cite:@item1: -@item2 p. 30; see also @item3] says blah.
>   5. A citation group [cite:: see @item1 p. 34-35; also @item3 chap. 3].
>   6. Another one [cite::see @item1 p. 34-35].
>   7. Citation with a suffix and locator [cite:: @item1 pp. 33, 35-37, and nowhere else].
>   8. A citation without locators [cite:: @item3].
>   9. Citation with suffix only [cite:: @item1 and nowhere else].
>   10. Like a citation without author: [cite:: -@item1], and now Doe
>       with a locator [cite:: -@item2 p. 44].
>
> explicitly, syntax would be either
>
>   [cite:IN-TEXT-KEY]
>
> or
>
>   [cite:IN-TEXT-KEY?:SPACE* CITATIONS]
>
> where CITATIONS is any number of
>
>   PREFIX? KEY SUFFIX?
>
> separated with semi-colons.
>
> It is slightly more verbose, but also more regular and faster to parse.

I guess I could live with this, but to be honest, I much prefer the Pandoc way.

The Pandoc syntax has a nice congruence between the source file and
the output: if a cite key is inside the brackets in the source, the
reference is inside the brackets in the output, and if it's outside in
the source, it's outside in the output.  This convention seems
natural, easy to remember, and very readable -- at least if, like me
(and I would guess many others), you use author names in cite keys.

By contrast, I'm used to thinking of footnote labels as having no
direct correlation with the output, so it seems incongruent to use the
analogous position in citation syntax to represent in-text citations.

So as an author, I prefer the Pandoc way, but I understand there are
other considerations.  If we must have the tag for performance
reasons, I would prefer using two different tags to represent the two
cases; I suggest borrowing (from LaTeX's natbib package) "citet" for
in-text and "citep" for bracketed citations , but I don't really care
as long as they're easy to type, and it's easy to change one to the
other.

What do others think?

Best,
Richard