[O] bibliographystyle in scimax

[Joseph Vidal-Rosset]

Dear John,

I am happy to tell you that your scimax
https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax is a wonderful tool for emacs, for
org-mode and for exporting in LaTeX with references. I advice strongly
its use.

I am using Gnus and not mu4e to write emails and it works well now
thanks of the help of Eric Fraga.

This email is just about a detail. I guess it would be possible in
theory to get the bibliography style that I want in email as well as
in any other exported document, but it is not the case for the html
export and therefore not for html email in Gnus. It is too bad,
because apalike for example is a good option that avoids Jan von
Plato’s reproach vonplato2017:

A great disservice is being done to scholarship by the reference system
prevalent today that has running numbers, usually in square brackets,
for the items in the references. The defects of this system are twofold.
First, it is enormously disturbing for the reader to be constantly
checking the list of references to see what article or book is being
referred to. The reader’s memory is burdened with information that
has no meaning elsewhere. Second, the awareness of who did what
and when is eroded little by little. If we read Gödel (1931) or Gentzen
(1936), we know what that is, contrary to a plain [104] and [90], say,
and similarly with hundreds of other works. Such couplings of names
and years give us a timeline that is indispensable for an awareness of
the development of logic or any other part of science. The thoughtless
“bibtex” square bracket numbering system of references is destroying
such awareness and should therefore be universally abandoned. It has
just one, totally inessential advantage: that it saves some space. In a
standard article, that may be a few lines, and in a book, a page or two.

So, do you think that it is possible to adopt the apalike bibliography
style in html document also?

Best wishes,

Jo.

Bibliography

• [vonplato2017] Jan von Plato, The Great Formal Machinery Works: Theories of Deduction and Computation at the Origins of the Digital Age, Princeton University Press (2017).