Re: [wip-cite-new] Initial implementation of `csl' citation processor

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 3:51 AM Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de> wrote:
>
> Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:
>
> > By default, no export processor is selected. All citations are
> > removed from output, and print_bibliography keywords, ignored.
>
> As I'm coming from LaTeX and have been bitten more than once by
> missing citations in the output (which is solved far better today by
> biblatex), I would say this is not a very good default.
>
> Citations should never be removed (or only with quite some effort). If
> you publish a text where citations have been removed by accident,
> that's asking for much trouble.
>
> Therefore I would suggest to set some sensible default that at least
> does not remove citations. For example a simple ASCII export with
> number or author-year style could be the default citation export for
> all back-ends. For quite some users (e.g. non-academic, internal
> white-papers etc.) this may be also a "good enough" solution, so they
> get easy citation support OOTB.
>
> Everyone else would choose some more sophisticated back-end.
>
> > It could be possible to change `org-cite-export-processor' so it
> > becomes an alist where you can associate back-ends to processors.
> > But I can't see how to transpose it nicely to cite_export keyword.
>
> What about "cite_export" for a single/default export engine and
> "cite_export_<backend>" (with "<backend>" something like "html",
> "latex", "md", etc.) for overriding the citation exporter for the
> given back-end, e.g.
>
> cite_export ascii
> cite_export_latex biblatex chicago
> cite_export_html csl "some style"
>
> (I forgot about the correct syntax for cite_export, so just a really
> rough sketch to illustrate the idea).
>
> Would that be feasible?

This is similar to what Andras was suggesting, though his suggestion
is even simpler, because it would only have one for latex; so just
default and latex.

I think that's all we need.

> > I'm not convinced this would be an improvement either. For example,
> > you may want to use two different processors with the same back-end.
>
> I'm not sure if this is true for many back-ends. Currently, I would
> assume that this is only the case for the LaTeX back-end (e.g.
> preparing a paper for different journals with different citations
> requirements). But in this case LaTeX has already quite some tools
> that could be utilized. All the different kinds of citation commands
> are there to be able to easily switch styles for the whole document
> (within a single back-end).

To review, for people that may not be that familiar with CSL, in particular.

LaTeX does all that, with the major limitation that it doesn't do
HTML, docx, rtf, etc.

CSL with citeproc-el does LaTeX (completely bypassing
bibtex/biblatex), and plain text and HTML, and implementations like
pandoc, also do docs, rtf, etc.

So even LaTeX users would likely still want to have oc-csl as their
default processor, for when they want to export to HTML or plain text.

Some, or even many, LaTeX users would prefer to use oc-natib or
oc-biblatex for primary latex export though.

I'm not convinced it's necessary or useful to separately configure for
plain text vs HTML.

Bruce