Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[Aaron Ecay]

Hi Thomas,

2015ko otsailak 25an, "Thomas S. Dye"-ek idatzi zuen:
> 
> BibLaTeX has 6 standard "subtypes", which it calls "standard commands".
> 
> A citation style can provide any number of specialized commands in
> addition to the 6 standard commands.
> 
> The various citation styles that ship with BibLaTeX together include
> seven specialized commands, for a total of 13.

I count roughly 50 commands in sections 3.7.1 – 3.7.6 of the biblatex
user’s manual (version 2.9a of 24/06/2014).  Some of these are quite
esoteric, of course, but they are all provided.

> 
> In this design, the potential explosion in subtypes has been pretty well
> kept in check.  Does that make the design of BibLaTeX a good model for
> Org mode?

I don’t know, but I suspect not.  Latex allows users to create powerful
macros, but has relatively few built-in niceties (some are provided by
auctex and friends, but that’s separate).  Org’s macro facilities,
though also powerful, are not well-integrated into its considerable
interactive features.

By way of illustration, Biblatex (AFAICT) doesn’t provide a possessive
citation command, which was mentioned by someone in this thread (or its
predecessor) as a desideratum.  I’d expect a savvy latex user to put in
their preamble:

\newcommand{\citeposs}[1]{\citeauthor{#1}’s (\citeyear{#1})}

That doesn’t really work in org.  (It could be put together with an org
macro, but would lose the kind of click-to-view functionality that
org-ref already provides and which would be ported to the new syntax as
well.)

Org needs to be smarter about anticipating users’ needs, because it
doesn’t rely on them to program their own solution using the markup
language.  And, insofar as all 50+ biblatex commands are actually
needed, it would be good to see if it’s possible to cut them into more
digestible chunks.

-- 
Aaron Ecay