Re: [O] org-cite and org-citeproc

[Richard Lawrence]

Hi Tom and all,

Thanks for answering my questions!

address@hidden (Thomas S. Dye) writes:

> With natbib, it is possible to give a pre-note and a post-note to the
> citation as a whole, but not to individual citations within it.  In
> order to support your syntax fully, I think BibLaTeX is needed.

OK, good to know.

>> (Also, do you think it is important to support plain BibTeX at all?  It
>> seems like we should not bother with this problem unless it's important
>> for a lot of people.  I personally would be fine with just targeting
>> BibLaTeX, and it sounds like Eric would be too.)
>
> Well, one benefit of Aaron's function was to make this choice
> superfluous, both now and in the future.  It binds the two citation
> commands you've implemented to citation commands implemented in
> CITATION_STYLE.  As Aaron notes, it should be easy to modify this (to
> bind additional commands) when advanced citation support comes along.

I think I have to retract what I said earlier: I doubt this part of
Aaron's code still works in my branch, because I think Aaron was
assuming citation objects contain just one reference; in my branch, I've
merged in the parser support Nicolas later implemented for multi-cite
citations.  So a CITATION_MODE needs to know how to turn a list of
works, each with associated prefix and suffix data, into a complete
citation command.

This complicates things enough that probably custom citation modes
should be defined as Lisp functions, rather than via format
strings...what do you think?

I'm still having a hard time seeing what an analogous customization
would look like for non-LaTeX backends.  The LaTeX exporter is unique in
that Org produces output which must then be further processed by another
tool, so having customizable control over how a citation `looks' to that
tool makes sense.  But in other backends, the Org exporter itself
produces the final document; there's no intermediate representation
besides Org's own, plus whatever arguments are passed to a citation
processing tool like org-citeproc.  So, if that's right, the analogous
customization in a non-LaTeX backend would be something like a filter,
one that pre-processes citation objects before they are run through the
external tool, or that post-processes the strings that come back (or
both).  Does that make sense?  Certainly, both of those things are
possible.

> Typically, a bibliography style file defines several citation commands,
> which might belong to one or more modes.  ...
> I think you might be able to merge CSL_FILE and CITATION_STYLE, since
> they both point to a style file.

OK, I see, that makes things clearer.  Would it make sense to have two
keywords, say LATEX_CITE_STYLE and CSL_FILE or similar, so that the
style can vary independently when exporting to LaTeX vs. non-LaTeX?  I'm
thinking it will be tricky to come up with a single set of values for a
CITATION_STYLE keyword that can be correctly mapped to both kinds of
backend.  Or maybe CITATION_STYLE should have "sub"-keywords, like

#+CITATION_STYLE: biblatex:authoryear csl:chicago-author-date.csl

or something similar?

Best,
Richard