Re: Org citations, CSL and citeproc-el

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

Dear Simonyi,
 
Simonyi András <andras.simonyi@gmail.com> writes:

> a few days ago I've released the first public version of 
> citeproc-el (https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-el), a 
> CSL 1.01 citation processor library for Emacs.
 
Wow!  I don't know if you are aware, but we had discussed the 
possibility of building something like this on the list a few 
years back.  At the time it seemed like a lot more work than 
anyone was willing to do, and so the effort stalled.  Thanks so 
much for working on this -- it looks like you've done a ton of 
work!

> The resulting link syntax is rather cumbersome so I'd like to 
> ask your opinion about introducing an alternative org-mode 
> citation syntax that handles all of these elements.  One option 
> would be to use something very similar to pandoc's citation 
> syntax (which I tried to follow as much as possible in the cite 
> link descriptions of citeproc-orgref). 

We had a (very) long discussion about implementing a new citation 
syntax for Org in the spring of 2015.  Most of it took place in 
February and March; see:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-02/threads.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-03/threads.html 

And here is how I summarized the state of that discussion in June:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-06/msg00426.html

The upshot was that we came to agreement on quite a few points 
about what citation syntax should look like, and those points have 
been implemented in Org syntax in the wip-cite branch of the Org 
repo.  (This branch is now long out of date and at the very least 
in need of a rebase onto current master, I suspect.)  It would be 
really great to get things moving again.  Using your code to 
provide citation processing during Org export for the syntax 
that's already been implemented would be the place to start.

There are other aspects of the syntax we agreed on that are not 
implemented yet; as I recall, the idea was to get a minimal 
agreeable subset working, and then add to it based on real-world 
experience and feedback.
 
> A more general question I'd like to raise how (or whether) you 
> see citeproc-el's (and CSL's) potential place in the org-mode 
> ecosystem.  There are a lot of directions which the further 
> development could take (BibLaTeX support, citeproc-YAML 
> bibliographies, CSL editing and CSL extensions etc.) and I'd be 
> grateful to receive your input on which ones I should focus on. 

Here's my two cents on this. From what I recall about the 
discussion (it's hard to believe it's already been almost three 
years...), I would focus on two things:

1) BibLaTeX support.  Most Org users who want citation support 
want it primarily for LaTeX export, and BibLaTeX provides a good 
model of what we should try to achieve in Org citation support.

2) org-bibtex support.  Org-bibtex is a library that represents 
citation data via Org's property syntax.  Some people use this and 
it would be great to have it integrated with the new citation 
syntax and export.  That would provide an end-to-end citation 
solution that is completely native to Org and Emacs. 

Again, thanks for jump-starting this effort!  I look forward to 
contributing to it this spring.

-- 
Best,
Richard