Re: citations: org-cite vs org-ref 3.0

[Vikas Rawal <vikasrawal@gmail.com>]

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Dear John,

Thanks very much for taking time to write a detailed reply.

I do not think it is productive for the community to say or consider it
> is a sad situation.


From the perspective of a user, this was only meant to express a sentiment
that one finds oneself in a situation of having to choose between two good
things, and that we have not been able to find a way to make both
compatible with each other. It was in not meant as a disrespect in any way.

My use case is very similar to yours and I have been an org-ref user for a
long time (I was surely one of the earliest beneficiaries of your work),
having written two books and innumerable research papers with org-ref
citation syntax. Being able to export to LaTeX has been my primary use but
the fact that citations were not exported easily to other formats thus far
was a problem I had to struggle with every now and then.


> There are more than 8 years of legacy org-ref documents. I have written
> 40+ scientific papers with it, and countless technical documents with
> more than 8000 cite links among them. org-ref has exceeded 190K
> downloads from MELPA, so I feel obligated to maintain org-ref for
> myself, and those users.


Given that it is not very difficult to convert a document from old org-ref
citation syntax to the org-cite syntax, at least as far as citation is
concerned, this should not be a big problem. Do these documents use
citation commands that are not available in org-cite? Can those not be
added to org-cite?


> I think org-ref and org-cite have different priorities, they solve
> different problems with different approaches, and they have different
> pros and cons.


It might be useful to discuss specific gaps (such as citenum) that need to
be plugged in org-cite for it to be usable. In fact, making org-cite usable
for a heavyweight user like you is a useful goalpost.

I understand that you do not particularly like the modularity and
complexity of org-cite way of specifying styles and variants. But if one is
able to make the two compatible, filling the gaps, they could have a
friendly co-existence with some way of being able to convert a document
between the two styles. And if there are some incompatibilities that cannot
be resolved, it would be good to know exactly what all those are. If
somebody was to write functions to convert from one format to the other,
they could choose how they want to deal with those incompatibilities.


> Cross-references are critical for me; without them, there is no path
> forward for me with org-cite. I did work on a cross-reference approach
> that leveraged org-cite syntax
> (https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref-cite/issues/16), but there was not
> much appetite for the approach so I abandoned that.


What org-ref seems to do with cross-references is very nice. Unfortunately
this would not be available if a user chooses to use org-cite. Do the
capabilities of cross-referencing have to be wedded to the citation system?

Can this not be resolved?


> I am content to agree to disagree on these points and move forward with
> both packages because they solve different problems, are suitable for
> different communities, and they continue to benefit each other.


Friendly co-existence should be our goal. But can that be a situation in
which one is able to choose between the best of both and, as far as
possible, switch from one to the other.

Thanks again for your time and effort,

Vikas

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