Re: Some projects

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2015-10-26, at 00:03, Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> - 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.  (I should say, all the work on the
>>   external tool was done by Richard Lawrence; I worked on the exporter
>>   for the citation syntax including the interface with an external
>>   tool.)
>
> This is probably a very naive question, but wouldn't it be possible to
> have a pure Elisp tool?  I understand that lack of manpower may be the
> main problem; are there any others?

Sure, but it’s a lot of work. citeproc-java is 22K lines:

      https://github.com/michel-kraemer/citeproc-java/graphs/contributors

>> - There is a difference between citations as done by latex/bibtex/etc.,
>>   and those done in every other format (handled through CSL).  Assuming
>>   latex users want to keep their native processing rather than
>>   delegating to CSL, we need to solve the myriad small inconsistencies
>>   between these two tools.  I think this is an area where it’s important
>>   to get things right: users of citations generally have exacting
>>   requirements.  “Approximately Chicago-style” or “almost MLA” aren’t
>>   worth anything.
>
> Out of curiosity: what is CSL?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_Style_Language

What is used by e.g. Zotero and Pandoc and mostly everyone who's not using
LaTeX.  Unfortunately, it is not as flexible as biblatex.  E.g. to get
"author (year)" and "(author, year)" I /think/ you need two separate
styles, but I could easily be wrong on this.  This was discussed
extensively earlier.

Rasmus

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