Hi Nicolas,

> At this point, I don’t have enough understanding of the problem to have
> an opinion. IIUC, your example does not even mention citations. How
> should it be used, what should be the output in LaTeX, and in UTF-8
> export? This is not clear to me.
>
> What can I say however is: if this feature implies to change, or extend,
> syntax, then it is /de facto/ a blocker for the merge, and needs to be
> sorted out.

This very much depends on how you view references vs citations. I personally
think of references as in-text citations (i.e. you’re citing other bits of the
very same document), but I doubt this is a common view (as suggested by other
replies).

To try to lay out what one may expect with references, I’d think some support in
Org (without org-ref et. al) would be good (at least for exporting) — but I’m
not sure what a good for would be.

I think it could be treated similarly to citations, given a variant syntax like
[<ref:#name>] or even just be added as a way of exporting links to named
figures/tables (i.e. ).

It’s a bit late to bring this up, but in case this should come under the
citation umbrella I thought I should.

Lastly, an example of what I’d expect when exporting to ascii (with three
example syntaxes):

┌────
│ #+name: sometab
│ #+caption: Some table
│ | a | b |
│ | c | d |
│ 
│ Hey, look at [[sometab]]. (or)
│ Hey, look at [cite:#sometab]. (or)
│ Hey, look at [ref:sometab].
└────

┌────
│ ━━━━━━
│  a  b 
│  c  d 
│ ━━━━━━
│ Table 1: Some table
│ 
│ Hey, look at Table 1.
└────

I hope this clears up what I was thinking.

All the best,
*Timothy*