Re: current status of citation syntax discussion

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

Hi Rasmus and all,

Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:

> Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Am just wondering what the current status is of the work that was being
>> done earlier this year on improved citation support in org.  Has an
>> official syntax been settled on?
>
> AFAIK: No.  Some people wanted something like [cite/type: pre @key post].
> Some people wanted additional key-value support, something like
> [cite: pre @key post]{:key val}.  Some people wanted @key
> to be able to contain arbitrary characters such as punctuation.

I just wanted to chime in about this.  While Rasmus is right that we
didn't reach complete agreement on everything, it seemed to me that we
agreed on quite a lot.  As Nicolas notes, the core of what we agreed on
has been implemented in Org syntax in the wip-cite branch.  Consensus
seemed to be that we should hold off on adopting any standard syntax for
the points of disagreement Rasmus mentions until we have a greater sense
of what's needed, based on real-world use.

There has also been some work on implementing the semantics for the
citation syntax.  Aaron Ecay wrote an org-cite library that uses
citeproc-java to process citations on export.  His version is in the
wip-cite-awe branch.  I believe (though I don't remember exactly) that
Aaron's version of org-cite doesn't support the full syntax in the
wip-cite branch yet.

I further modified Aaron's org-cite library to support the full syntax
and to do citation processing via pandoc-citeproc, rather than
citeproc-java.  My version is in the wip-cite-org-citeproc branch,
available here:

https://github.com/wyleyr/org-mode

To use this code, you also need org-citeproc, a command-line wrapper
around pandoc-citeproc that the org-cite library talks to:

https://github.com/wyleyr/org-citeproc 
 
I got this setup working pretty well with at least Chicago-like citation
styles.  More work is needed to make org-citeproc work with footnote or
numeric styles.

Vaidheeswaran also added support for processing citations via JabRef.
His work is here:

http://repo.or.cz/w/org-mode/org-cv.git

I believe that at the moment, Vaidheeswaran's implementation is only
integrated with the ODT exporter, though I am not sure.

AFAIK, that's the state of things.  I personally haven't had much time
for hacking on org-cite or org-citeproc, though I hope to get back to it
in a couple of weeks.  To be honest, I have been a bit reluctant to
press on with it because at least some people (Aaron, Rasmus) seem to
feel pretty strongly that they don't want Org citation processing to
depend on a Haskell-based tool.  

That's fine, but it means we need an alternative.  The main non-Haskell
contenders for CSL processing are citeproc-java and citeproc-js.  So, if
that's the way we want to go, someone needs to write the equivalent of
org-citeproc for one of these libraries: a wrapper around them that
allows the org-cite library to make use of them during export.
(Unfortunately, that means I am not the man for the job.  I don't know
Java or JavaScript, and I am not really interested in learning them just
for the sake of this project.)

I hope I haven't missed anything; those are my impressions of where
we're at!

Best,
Richard