Re: [O] Citations, continued

[Richard Lawrence]

Hi John and all,

On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 1:46 AM, John Kitchin <address@hidden> wrote:
> My only concern is that it remains possible to support this relatively
> full set of citation options on export:
> ...
> which we are currently able to do. I never type any of those in, org-ref
> does it automatically from a key selection tool.

My original proposal was that we achieve this by allowing splitting
citations into an in-line pointer and out-of-line definition.  Since
the out-of-line definition would be a greater element, it could take
#+ATTR_BACKEND properties, which could be used for this, like so:

The literature is divided on this point. [cite:1]

#+ATTR_LATEX: :command autocites
[cite:1] For Position A see @Doe99; @Smith99; for Position B see @Foobar87.

What I like about this is that it separates the citation part from the
LaTeX-specific part, and it leverages existing syntax for the
LaTeX-specific part.  Something like this seems right to me.

Would that work for you, most of the time?

I am not sure we could do this under Nicolas' current proposal, but
maybe we could.

Also, I realize now that this out-of-line definition style doesn't
mesh super well with any way of expressing the distinction between
bracketed and in-text citations that has been suggested, so it still
needs a bit more thought, at least if this style can be used for
in-text citations.

> From a user point of view, these to me look almost identical to link
> syntax, which could be confusing.

I'm not overly worried about this, because it doesn't seem worse than
distinguishing links and footnotes.  (Highlighting can help, too.)

> I don't personally find the pandoc notation easier to understand, eg
> address@hidden and address@hidden
>
> vs
>
> \cite{item} and \citeauthor{item}

Well, I think it's a *little* better than straight LaTeX syntax.  As
far as readability goes, it's nice that you can put the prefix and
suffix in the order they will read ("see @Doe99 for more" vs.
"\cite[see][for more]{Doe99}").

But the main advantage is not that it is easier to understand (it
isn't, at least not if you already know LaTeX), but that it is
abstracted from LaTeX syntax, or any other target format's syntax.
We're looking to make citations first-class syntactic citizens in Org.
  (We *could* even do that just by adopting LaTeX syntax as our
own...but I don't know if anyone would plump for that. :)

> The congruence you mention is not relevant for superscripted references,
> there are no brackets or parentheses in that case.

True.  Do you use superscripted references a lot?  I never use them, personally.

Best,
Richard