Re: [O] Citations, continued

[Thomas S. Dye]

Richard Lawrence <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Tom and all,
>
> address@hidden (Thomas S. Dye) writes:
>
>> Richard Lawrence <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Conceptually, something like address@hidden:year' isn't a citation, but 
>>> merely
>>> indirection, because it doesn't actually provide the reader of the
>>> rendered document enough information to look up the reference.  I think
>>> we can cut down on the number of `citation' types that the syntax should
>>> support if we distinguish citations from indirection like this.
>>
>> I don't think this concept holds in the LaTeX world.  I'm fairly certain
>> that citation commands like \citeauthor and \citeyear create an entry in
>> the bibliography.
>
> Fair enough.  I just meant that something like
>
> "As the reader may verify, \citeyear{Doe99} fails to make any progress
> on this issue."
>
> doesn't render into a form that allows the reader to know which work is
> being talked about, even if that work appears in the bibliography; the
> author has to supply more context for it to make sense.  Thus, \citeyear
> and friends are more of a convenience for the author than commands to
> produce a (complete) citation that the reader can use.
>
> But I don't really care so much about the right definition of "citation"
> as about the fact that supporting an equivalent for these commands in
> non-LaTeX backends strikes me as really hard, which makes me wonder if
> the effort required to support them is worth the convenience gained by
> representing them in the main citation syntax.
>
> It seems like it would be hard because providing equivalents for things
> like \citeauthor or \citetitle in, say, HTML would require the exporter
> to know a *lot* about how to format names and titles in the context
> where those citations appear.  This is a very non-trivial problem.
>
> But perhaps the exporter could rely on an external CSL processor for
> things like this?  I don't really know if CSL can handle this kind of
> `partial' citation -- if it can, and if CSL is part of the plan for
> exporting citations in non-LaTeX backends, then I have no real objection
> to representing them in the citation syntax, because they are indeed
> convenient.
>
> Best,
> Richard

Couldn't the syntax be extensible so it accommodates any citation
command?

Perhaps each backend could support an appropriate set of commands and
fallback to a default if the user tries an unsupported command?

If a LaTeX user wants all the citation commands for an html document,
there are converters such as tex4ht.  Org mode doesn't need to reinvent
that wheel.

I expect that ox-latex will often need to support new citation commands
as the humanities continue to develop styles based on biblatex.  Perhaps
we should view extensible syntax as "backend extensible" rather than
"user extensible"?

All the best,
Tom

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com