Re: More questions about CSL and org-mode

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

Hi John,

John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

> Thanks.
>
> Its an interesting jam. You want to have multiple outputs as a
> possibility, but there isn't a robust markup that readily works across
> all backends.

Yes, indeed.  

> On export the in-text citations are transformed to unique text blobs,
> e.g. uuids, and the document exported. The only important features of
> these blobs is that they do not get changed on export, and they are
> unique because we replace them later.
>
> The strings in the bibliography entry are "exported" to convert the
> org-markup to the output format. The in-text citations, expanded
> bibliography and style are sent to the citation processor, which outputs
> replacements and a formatted bibliography in the desired output format.
>
> Finally, you replace each uuid with the appropriate replacement, and
> insert the bibliography where it belongs. That should be the final
> document.

IIUC, the problem with this approach is that it will not work well when
the citation style is note-based rather than inline.  The main
motivation for going "back to Org" is that note-based styles require the
document structure to change as a result of citation processing: new
footnotes have to be inserted, and existing ones have to be renumbered.
That is relatively hard to do if the rest of the document is already in
the target format (except with LaTeX).  By doing citation processing
early in the export process and converting the results to Org, we can
rely on Org's footnote processing to handle this later in the export
process.

As far as I can see, if it weren't for note-based styles, this approach
would work fine.  (Indeed, it is pretty much what the existing org-cite
code does, except that the mapping between citations and their
replacements is done with Lisp data structures rather than via string
replacement in the output buffer.  I stopped work on that right about
the time I realized the existing approach wouldn't work very well with
note-based styles.)

But given the problem about nested formatting, going back to Org at the
level of text replacements doesn't work.  In other words: both of the
simple-minded approaches (process citations directly to text in the
target format, or process them to Org text, then let Org convert them to
the target format) face problems.

I think probably what we'll have to do to accommodate both note-based
styles and the possibility of nested formatting is to get the results of
citation processing in some unambiguous format like HTML or JSON, then
parse it, and then use the result to directly modify the parse tree for
the Org document before continuing the export process.  I can't see an
easier way...can anyone else?

Best,
Richard