Re: exporting zotxt or orgref links to HTML and ODF

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Hi,

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:

> 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.

It works for me as well, but it's still an ugly hack that I cannot advice
friends and colleagues to follow.

Still, I would much rather have quality-support like with entities.

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

Indeed.  Pandoc seems to most sensible.  I have a survey of
implementations in on my other computer (in a folder that is not synced
between my PCs).

> 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.

Maybe something like:

@short-textcite-key, (@parentcite-key) and [@textcite-key :with options]
(@parencite-key :with options).

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

From my experience with social science publication, one needs to be able
to add options (e.g. cite-type, "citeyear", say) and pre and post notes.

> 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.

I guess.  But it can be added gradually.

BTW: Org has an almost-agnostic format for storing citation data via
org-bibtex.el.  So perhaps it's easier to go from whatever to
org-bibtex-format and from there to ox-backend-format.  I think that's how
pandoc does it as well.
 
—Rasmus

-- 
May the Force be with you