Re: exporting zotxt or orgref links to HTML and ODF

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

Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:

> IMO we /need/ to add proper citation support to Org, preferably with a
> real syntax rather than these link-"solutions" and with good backend
> support (bibtex & Zotero for starters, I guess).
> ...
> /Proper/ citation support (not links) is, IMO, the last thing that is
> missing for good academic publishing support.

Although my home-baked solution presently works for me, I am inclined to
agree.

I've just had a glance at: http://pandoc.org/README.html#citations

It looks to me like Pandoc has a quite general solution, and it also
looks like Org could use Pandoc's citation syntax as-is.  I would
suggest borrowing this syntax as a starting point for building citation
support into Org.

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Citations go inside square brackets and are separated by
semicolons. Each citation must have a key, composed of ‘@’ + the
citation identifier from the database, and may optionally have a prefix,
a locator, and a suffix. The citation key must begin with a letter or _,
and may contain alphanumerics, _, and internal punctuation characters
(:.#$%&-+?<>~/). Here are some examples:

Blah blah [see @doe99, pp. 33-35; also @smith04, ch. 1].

Blah blah [@doe99, pp. 33-35, 38-39 and *passim*].

Blah blah [@smith04; @doe99]. 

A minus sign (-) before the @ will suppress mention of the author in the
citation. This can be useful when the author is already mentioned in the
text:

Smith says blah [-@smith04].

You can also write an in-text citation, as follows:

@smith04 says blah.

@smith04 [p. 33] says blah.
#+END_QUOTE

Org does use single brackets and `@'-signs for other things (footnote
markers, priorities, statistics cookies, inactive timestamps, list
counters, inline export snippets -- I think that's it).  But these
should all be pretty easy to tell apart from citations using regular
expressions, so I wouldn't expect parsing this syntax to present any
difficulties.

Does anyone have citation needs that this syntax doesn't cover?

Using this syntax would also have the advantage that Pandoc can already
parse it, which would reduce friction for Org users who convert their
documents with Pandoc (and Pandoc users who need to deal with Org
inputs).  Since this seems like a significant contingent of Org users,
that's something to consider.

The bigger question is whether, in addition to a citation *syntax*, it
would be a lot of work to add support for the various citation database
formats, as well as the various output styles, and which ones to
support.

Best,
Richard