Re: [O] org-cite and org-citeproc

[Richard Lawrence]

Hi Tom and all,

address@hidden (Thomas S. Dye) writes:

>> I know next to nothing about citations in general, so please bear with
>> me: if multi-cite support means being able to condense citations (e.g.
>> [1-3, 5, 9]), then bibtex can do at least some of that
>> (e.g. http://texblog.org/2007/05/28/mulitple-reference-citation/).
>
> Multiple citations with natbib are limited in the sense that individual
> citations within them don't carry pre- and post-notes.  BibLaTeX does
> away with this restriction.

Just to clarify: our syntax allows both pre- and post-notes for each
individual reference within a citation, plus common pre- and post-notes
for the citation as a whole.  Is it only the latter which BibTeX does
not support?  Or is it also that it can't handle pre- and post-notes for
individual references when there is more than one work cited?  I don't
think I've ever tried to do something that complicated with plain BibTeX.

(Also, do you think it is important to support plain BibTeX at all?  It
seems like we should not bother with this problem unless it's important
for a lot of people.  I personally would be fine with just targeting
BibLaTeX, and it sounds like Eric would be too.)

> The org-export-cite-add-citation-mode-latex function that Aaron Ecay
> wrote allows the author to choose (implicitly) which package to use.  I
> like this design because it can accommodate new packages without changes
> to the Org mode code.
>
> ,-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> | Your comment inspired me to implement                                   
> | org-export-cite-add-citation-mode-latex in the experimental citation    
> | support I just pushed.  So you can do:                                  
> |                                                                         
> | (org-export-cite-add-citation-mode-latex "tsd"                          
> | "\\mycitecommand[%s][%s]{%s}" "\\myparencitecommand[%s][%s]{%s}")       
> |                                                                         
> | Add to your document:                                                   
> |                                                                         
> | #+CITATION_MODE: tsd                                                    
> |                                                                         
> | And citations should just work with your chosen commands.  I’m sure when
> | advanced citation support comes along (whether from subtypes or plists),
> | a similarly simple wrapper can be implemented.                          
> `-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I haven't found time to experiment with the citation developments or to
> read through the developing code base.  Was this feature of Aaron's
> experimental support subsequently dropped?

No, I haven't touched that part of the code, and as far as I know that
should still work.  However, I also haven't been able to make sense of
how the CITATION_MODE and CITATION_STYLE keywords should work in
non-LaTeX backends, so my code doesn't make any use of them, either.  

If I understand correctly, the mode and the style are two pieces of
information that jointly determine how citations should be formatted.
The reason they are separated is that you can have multiple styles
associated with a mode (or is it the other way around?).  Is it right to
say that in LaTeX, choosing a mode and a style determines both
which citation commands are available and what their behavior is?

In the CSL world, both of these pieces of information seem to be
determined by the choice of CSL stylesheet.  Thus, I went with a single
keyword, CSL_FILE, to specify this information.  I guess one could also
go the other way, and try to select a stylesheet based on CITATION_MODE
and CITATION_STYLE, but I wasn't sure how to do that.  I also don't
really know if it would be useful to provide a notion of `custom modes'
outside of LaTeX; as far as I can see, all customization would just come
down to selecting a different stylesheet.  But maybe I'm missing
something important?

Best,
Richard