Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[Rasmus]

Hi,

Aaron Ecay <address@hidden> writes:

> I’ve pushed an update to my branch.

Thank you Aaron!  I appreciate the work.  While the below may sound
bitter, it's not!

> These are then slurped by org, and used to fill in printf-style
> templates.  Some people mentioned using citations as generated by
> citeproc-java directly.  However, I don’t believe this is reliable since
> (as also mentioned), it is difficult to control whether a certain style
> uses parentheses around a citation or not, whether the citation is
> capitalized*, the insertion of prefixes/suffixes within the parentheses,
> etc.

If so, is there *any* advantage is using a processors over say
bibtex.el/reftex-cite.el/org-bibtex-parser.el?  We'd get a couple of more
backends, right?  But this step can presumably be handled by other tools
as necessary.

If we have to do processing to the extend you describe (or I imagine that
you describe), I'm not sure there's a point in relying on a external tool,
which we cannot easily extend as opposed to fixing bugs we might encounter
in reftex-cite or "forking"/reimplementing functions we need from there.

> So I think the only solution is to implement the formatting of the
> in-text portion of citations ourselves, and use citeproc-java only to
> extract authors and years.

See above.  I then don't see the point.

> Using citeproc gives us for free sophisticated disambiguation of authors
> that share a last name (by adding first initial) or works by the same
> author in the same year (by adding a letter suffix to the year).

That's a fair point, but I don't understand it.  I haven't looked at your
code!  I guess you'd have to generate the whole bibliography to get this
data?  It sounds messy...  Note, reftex.el + friends is probably equally
messy.  And I don't know if it offers any support for bibliographies.

What I gather is that a big selling point of csl is the plentifulness of
styles.  But you say we anyway need curated CSL styles to make it work.
But then, is there any advantage of it left?

A similar idea, explored on the list, is using Jabref as a processor.  I
don't know about the copyright status, though. 

> Some people have talked about supporting other CSL processors.  I don’t
> see much utility in that, since CSL is a standard that all processors
> should implement faithfully.

+1.

> 1. Is any important functionality lost by using citeproc-java as the CSL
>    processor, rather than jabref?

I guess Jabref supports odt about of the box.  I don't know what the
sophistication of Jabref style language is viz-a-viz CSL.  I don't
understand if your work aims to support CSL or an "approved" subset of
CSL.

> 2. Is it possible to support for implement importing citations from
>    jabref through the “lookup types” facility in my code?

This is major.  I don't want to Jabref to manage citation and I would
rather not give it write access to my citation library as it has encoding
issues.

> 3. How are citations formatted for export to ODT?  An example of the
>    ODT/XML code for something like “as demonstrated by Smith (2015)”,
>    where “Smith (2015)” has whatever fancy formatting a citation is
>    expected to have in ODT, would be helpful.

It's a big mystery.  tex4ht/oolatex also manages.  Some sort of internal
database is generated.  I don't know how styling is managed.

—Rasmus

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