Re: pandoc-style citations

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Alex,

Alex Fenton <alex.fenton@pressure.to> writes:

>> Export is where efforts stalled last year.
>
> That's understandable, given that, as you say, it's a complex problem 
> given the range of citation styles and output formats. It's still a 
> shame given the work that you (pl.) have put into integrating citations 
> into the org parser & element tree so they are first class objects.
>
> I don't know whether it's conceivable that the data structures and 
> parsing could be integrated into org, with the (presumably) relatively 
> easy latex output, which I suspect is the commonest use case, and then 
> with some kind of "adequate" output for other targets (html, text, odt) 
> - perhaps an output that would require further post-processing by a 
> third-party tool such as citeproc or pandoc.
>
> Latex-outputters would be better off and other targets no worse off than 
> present, and it might act as a spur to solve the other target formats 
> one by one way. But I can see that this has been to some extent 
> considered and can also see the arguments against.

Unfortunately, even the LaTeX case is not so easy unless you assume
users are managing the bibliography database, and the mapping of
citation keys into that database, themselves.  It's easy to map the Org
syntax to the LaTeX syntax if you can just pass the keys through, but
that isn't a great assumption to make.  And things are a lot more
complicated once you have to worry about looking up the keys somewhere,
generating an appropriate .bib file, etc. We will have to do this stuff
for other backends anyway, so it seems sensible to do it for LaTeX too,
but that's what makes the project so big (especially if we can't just
pick one database format to support).

Maybe you're right that a good first step would just be to generate
LaTeX syntax, and just let users manage the bibliography database in
whatever way works for them, without trying to interface with it.  This
could be done quickly -- indeed, I think it is already most of the way
done.  And as you say, that would go a long way toward meeting many
people's needs.

I hope I will have some time next week to look at this.  I'll report
back!

Best,
Richard