Re: More questions about CSL and org-mode

[John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Thanks.

Its an interesting jam. You want to have multiple outputs as a
possibility, but there isn't a robust markup that readily works across
all backends.

What about this. For now consider a bibliography database with
org-formatting in the entries, e.g. subscripts, superscripts, etc...
(but not like putting italics on titles or anything related to
bibliography formatting). So I can have a title like "The role of H_{2}O
in /d/-orbital splitting of \alpha particles" in an entry. I assume it
would also be ok to have utf-8 characters in it. Equations are still
problematic, as we use LaTeX syntax for those.

On export the in-text citations are transformed to unique text blobs,
e.g. uuids, and the document exported. The only important features of
these blobs is that they do not get changed on export, and they are
unique because we replace them later.

The strings in the bibliography entry are "exported" to convert the
org-markup to the output format. The in-text citations, expanded
bibliography and style are sent to the citation processor, which outputs
replacements and a formatted bibliography in the desired output format.

Finally, you replace each uuid with the appropriate replacement, and
insert the bibliography where it belongs. That should be the final
document.

If you did this with a bibtex file, it would probably break its use in
LaTeX without some clever transformation of the bibtex file to a new
file that was LaTeX formatted, and an on the fly change to the org
buffer to use this new file. But, since the point of this is for
non-LaTeX export, I guess this is ok.

I bet you could even expand the bibtex format to include journal
abbreviations, and directly use the fields that CSL uses (although I
strongly dislike "container-title" for the journal name!)

The downside is the processor now needs to output different formats, but
presumably there are a few standard ones that are a one-time investment
like html.


Richard Lawrence writes:

> Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:
>
>>> IIUC, the current aim is to get a citeproc that will do the following on
>>> export:
>>> 1. replace in-text citation syntax with org-formatted replacements
>>> 2. Insert an org-formatted bibliography somewhere in the document
>>> 3. proceed with org-to-something export, with built-in
>>> exporters.
>>
>> That's basically my understanding too.  There is one snag with the
>> "org-formatted replacement" plan, though, which I saw in a Zotero dev
>> discussion yesterday.
>
> Here's the reference for that discussion, by the way:
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/zotero-dev/Bz_IenruxX4/24QWuyEIp_IJ
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
> P.S.  John, thanks for your continued research on this.  I see that our
> procrastination habits are on the same schedule. :)

--
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