Re: org-cite styles as flags (idea)

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 8:36 AM Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> In a recent thread it was discussed that currently style selection is
> not always obvious:
>
> John Kitchin. citations: org-cite vs org-ref 3.0.
> Sun, 27 Mar 2022 13:00:40 -0400.
> m24k3jnq0k.fsf@andrew.cmu.edu">https://list.orgmode.org/m24k3jnq0k.fsf@andrew.cmu.edu
>
> > [cite/na/b:@key] or [cite/noauthor/bare:@key] to mean \citeyear{key}?
> >
> > Why wouldn't it be \citetitle? or \citeurl, or \citedate? or even,
> > \citenum?
> >
> > I get it, you can define [cite/noauthor/year:] or even [cite/year:] or
> > [cite/y:] and even [cite/citeyear:] to get the command in there, and
> > something for each of those other ones. Maybe even the documented
> > convention will change to some other potentially mnemonic form.
>
> It seems, no backends uses hierarchy of substyles. Please, correct me, I
> may be wrong since I was BibTeX user and have not tried BibLaTeX.
>
> I have an idea to consider each component started from slash as
> independent boolean flags (or constraints), so they can be reordered
>
>     /author/bare/caps = /caps/bare/author

An earlier version of the oc processors had that syntax, but Nicolas
found it too complex to implement.

But I'm not sure; it's possible your suggestion differs from that
beyond the syntax.

Practically speaking, it's useful for portability if an author does
"text/x" and an export processor doesn't support "x", that it still
will use "text".

Bruce

> For citeproc.el it is a natural mapping since e.g. noauthor is
> implemented as a value of suppress-author parameter. For BibTeX commands
> it may be described as set of properties, so the code discards ones
> inconsistent with provided criteria. E.g. (:bare t :author nil :noauthor
> t :full nil) for \citeyear, :caps does not matter.
>
> As at was suggested earlier, /year modifier existing in oc-csl should be
> implemented for oc-natbib.
>
> [cite/author/noauthor:...] should generate a warning as an impossible
> combination and fallback to defaults.
>
> The origin of the proposal is the following part of the discussion:
>
> Bruce D'Arcus, Tue, 29 Mar 2022 12:14:03 -0400
> CAF-FPGOCm5m5jZSOu-37V77Me76EWwg_xcd4d7k30ffXS0HyQg@mail.gmail.com">https://list.orgmode.org/CAF-FPGOCm5m5jZSOu-37V77Me76EWwg_xcd4d7k30ffXS0HyQg@mail.gmail.com
> > On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 11:23 AM Max Nikulin wrote:
> >
> >> It seems modifiers are set of boolean flags (positive "year" or negative
> >> "suppress-author") in citeproc.el, set of values in natbib, and a kind
> >> of hierarchy in org-cite. From my point of view, set of constrains
> >> (flags) is the most general variant in this list.
> >
> > I think that's right, and is how it's represented in a GUI app like
> > Zotero. But that's not so convenient in a plain text format.
>
> I may easily miss something important making such idea broken. At least
> it looks like a backward-compatible change if old /caps-full is mapped
> to new /caps/full (or /full/caps).
>
>