Re: Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your thoughtful responses and your work on the citation
syntax.  My "author" concerns have been addressed in this thread and I
look forward to development now.  I'm +1 and optimistic about the switch
from home-brew links to citations in my Org mode work.

Thanks for your patience as I digested your proposals.  Let me know if
you think I can help in some way.

All the best,
Tom

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

> Hi Tom,
>
> tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye) writes:
>
>> I want a syntax that recognizes arbitrary citation commands because I
>> write in Org mode for publication.  You want a syntax that recognizes a
>> few commands that it might be possible to support in Org mode backends,
>> some of which are tied loosely, if at all, to publication.  Yours might
>> be a noble goal that many Org mode users will find useful (I hope it
>> is!), but I don't think it is (or will be) a syntax useful in my work,
>> for the following reasons:
>>
>> 1) It is easier for me to have the citation command in one place.  The
>> decision to represent selected aspects of the citation command in the
>> syntax and other parts in extensions means that I'd have to learn the
>> syntax and then remember which aspects were chosen for representation
>> and which I'd need to develop through extensions of my own.  This is a
>> lot more work than I do now to get exactly what I want through links.
>> I'm keen to simplify the authoring process, not make it more complex.
>>
>> 2) Treating footnote citations differently from author-date citations is
>> a non-starter for me.  When Science turns me away and the editor
>> suggests that my rant is well suited for another journal, one that
>> happens to use author-date citations, I'll just search all my citation
>> links and replace footcite with parencite before exporting the rant to
>> the suggested journal.  IIUC, with the official Org mode syntax, I'd be
>> faced with the tedious process of cutting and pasting footnote text back
>> into the document body.
>
> I do think it is important to support these kinds of uses, and I think
> it would be a shame if the official Org syntax did not make them
> relatively straightforward.  You are surely not the only person using
> Org to prepare documents for publication, and I'm sure this kind of
> per-journal `refactoring' is common and important to make easy.
>
> (You're right that our goals differ to some extent.  I am still in grad
> school.  Preparing documents for academic publication is a privilege I
> hope to have one day; but I am not presently one of the people using Org
> for this on a regular basis, though I hope I can in the future.  One
> reason I am concerned to have a citation syntax that can be exported by
> other backends is this: I am anxious that, unless I can also export my
> dissertation to HTML, the final document may never be read by anyone
> except backup programs on the library servers.  Another, more serious
> reason is that I work in a field where some journals do not accept LaTeX
> submissions, or disprefer them; so having some citation support in ODT
> export is important.)
>
> I *think* it should be possible to do the kinds of things you've
> described here using the syntax I proposed, but I may not understand
> everything you'd like to do.  If not, let's figure out what the other
> things are, and how to accommodate them.
>
> Basically, I think you could ignore the distinctions that the [cite:
> ...] syntax is capable of expressing, and just write all your citations
> like:
>
>   [cite: See @Doe99 for more on this point.] %%(:type footnoted)
>
> or, in the syntax Nicolas proposed, something like:
>
>   [cite: See @Doe99 for more on this point.]{:type footnoted}
>
> You would then use an export filter to transform citations with this
> :type into the appropriate command, something along the lines of:
>
> (defun footnoted-citation (citation backend info)
>   (let ((type (get-citation-type citation)
>         (pre (get-citation-prefix citation))
>         (post (get-citation-suffix citation))
>         (key (get-citation-key citation)))
>      (when (and (org-export-derived-backend-p backend 'latex)
>                 (eq type 'footnoted))
>        (format "\footcite[%s][%s]{%s}" pre post key))))
>
> (It would be more complicated than this in the general case, since a
> citation can contain more than one reference as well as common prefix
> and suffix text, but hopefully that illustrates the idea.)
>
> Then, when Science sends you elsewhere, you can just query-replace
> ":type footnoted" with ":type author-date", or whatever the appropriate
> type for the new journal is, which will have a different export filter
> (or a different clause in the same filter).
>
> That is more work than letting Org export citations for you, because it
> means manually processing every :type you use.  But maybe it is about
> the same amount of work as what you are doing now with custom links.
>
> This way, although you wouldn't be relying much on the default export
> behavior of citations, you could still get the other advantages of
> having them represented in Org syntax.  Those are things like having
> prefix/suffix text stand in a more readable relation to the key, having
> Org parse the different parts out for you, and having individual keys be
> clickable so you can look up the reference in your reference database or
> find an associated PDF.
>
> Would that be sufficient?  And are there other kinds of situation where
> you don't think the proposed syntax would work well?
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
>
>

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com