Dear Simonyi,
Simonyi András <address@hidden> writes:
a few days ago I've released the first public version of
citeproc-el (https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-el), a
CSL 1.01 citation processor library for Emacs.
Wow! I don't know if you are aware, but we had discussed the
possibility of building something like this on the list a few
years back. At the time it seemed like a lot more work than
anyone was willing to do, and so the effort stalled. Thanks so
much for working on this -- it looks like you've done a ton of
work!
The resulting link syntax is rather cumbersome so I'd like to
ask your opinion about introducing an alternative org-mode
citation syntax that handles all of these elements. One option
would be to use something very similar to pandoc's citation
syntax (which I tried to follow as much as possible in the cite
link descriptions of citeproc-orgref).
We had a (very) long discussion about implementing a new
citation syntax for Org in the spring of 2015. Most of it took
place in February and March; see:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-02/threads.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-03/threads.html
And here is how I summarized the state of that discussion in
June:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-06/msg00426.html
The upshot was that we came to agreement on quite a few points
about what citation syntax should look like, and those points
have been implemented in Org syntax in the wip-cite branch of
the Org repo. (This branch is now long out of date and at the
very least in need of a rebase onto current master, I suspect.)
It would be really great to get things moving again. Using your
code to provide citation processing during Org export for the
syntax that's already been implemented would be the place to
start.
There are other aspects of the syntax we agreed on that are not
implemented yet; as I recall, the idea was to get a minimal
agreeable subset working, and then add to it based on real-world
experience and feedback.
A more general question I'd like to raise how (or whether) you
see citeproc-el's (and CSL's) potential place in the org-mode
ecosystem. There are a lot of directions which the further
development could take (BibLaTeX support, citeproc-YAML
bibliographies, CSL editing and CSL extensions etc.) and I'd be
grateful to receive your input on which ones I should focus
on.
Here's my two cents on this. From what I recall about the
discussion (it's hard to believe it's already been almost three
years...), I would focus on two things:
1) BibLaTeX support. Most Org users who want citation support
want it primarily for LaTeX export, and BibLaTeX provides a good
model of what we should try to achieve in Org citation support.
2) org-bibtex support. Org-bibtex is a library that represents
citation data via Org's property syntax. Some people use this
and it would be great to have it integrated with the new
citation syntax and export. That would provide an end-to-end
citation solution that is completely native to Org and Emacs.
Again, thanks for jump-starting this effort! I look forward to
contributing to it this spring.