Re: Some projects

[Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com>]

Hi Richard, hi all,

2015ko urriak 26an, Richard Lawrence-ek idatzi zuen:
> 

[...]

>> I was working on this rather intensively at one time, but I had to stop
>> because other aspects of life intruded.  I have just been coming back
>> towards a situation where I can imagine myself having some (still small,
>> but non-zero) chunks of time to devote to working on org.  So I hope I
>> will be able to pick this back up, but (regrettably) I’m not able to
>> make any promises.
>> 
>> Based on my recollection, here’s what the problems were when I stopped:
>> 
>> - The only “off the shelf”-capable citation processing library that we
>> found last time is in Haskell, which introduced some difficulties for
>> distributing the resulting tool.  I know some projects
>> (e.g. git-annex) are written in Haskell and distributed as static
>> binaries for windows/mac/linux/etc.  We’d need to figure out how to do
>> this, or find another citation processing library in an
>> easier-to-distribute language.
> 
> Yes, this is my understanding, too.  In particular, there does not seem
> to be an Elisp CSL library, and it would be a lot of work to write one.
> 
> The other CSL library that looks complete and usable is citeproc-js; but
> like the Haskell library (pandoc-citeproc) it would need to be wrapped
> somehow so that it can talk with Org.
> 
> It should be relatively straightforward for someone who knows Javascript
> to write such a wrapper, if anyone wants to work on that.  But this does
> not really solve the problem with distribution.  

It solves many of the hard problems though.  Node.js is distributed
as a binary for many platforms.  We’d just have to direct users to
install this in the “normal way,” and use the installed binary to
interpret the JS source.  Whereas for haskell we’d be stuck building
the binary ourselves, worrying about static linking/dll hell/32-bit
dinosaurs/any of a half-dozen other problems that I don’t really
understand.

OTOH, pandoc-citeproc includes a bibtex parser; we’d need to write a JS
one and wire it up to citeproc-js.  When I looked (quite some time ago),
there did not seem to be any good bibtex parsing libraries in JS (and
several third-rate ones).

OT3rdH, responding to Matt’s message
<http://mid.gmane.org/CAN_Dec_52SP6ghR56PudHiH69KSPrQ0VDw2ZMnP5799-CtaVeQ@mail.gmail.com>,

> The disadvantage is that, from what I can tell, the javascript
> implementation is the canonical version of citeproc, and the place where
> improvements are pushed first.  So, for instance, if one wanted to
> implement an org-syntax output format for citeproc, citeproc-js would be
> the most likely project to support that work.

Pandoc can output org syntax, so it may be that we can just link with
the main pandoc haskell library as well as pandoc-citeproc and solve
this ourselves, without needing upstream support.

-- 
Aaron Ecay