Re: Citations, continued

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

Erik Hetzner <egh@e6h.org> writes:

> On Wed,  4 Feb 2015 at 07:59:46 PST,
> Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> wrote:
 
>> The idea is, a citation like "As Doe says in @Doe99:title, ..." should
>> render like "As Doe says in /The Title/, ...", not like "As Doe says in
>> Doe (1999), ...", even if "@Doe99" citations in the document generally
>> render like the latter.  I suspect this must be possible with
>> citeproc/CSL, but I don't actually know, since Pandoc doesn't provide
>> syntax for this kind of case.

> It’s not supported in existing citeproc implementations, but I think
> it would be possible to support something like this. On the other
> hand, this is also something that is easily done by hand, so I don’t
> know if it’s worth the trouble.

Actually, I've changed my mind; it occurs to me that there is a good
argument for /not/ adopting this syntax.  First of all, the cases it is
meant to cover are not really cases of /citations/ so much as cases of
/indirections/.  Writing "@Doe99:title" instead of the title of the work
is just to aid the author; it does not produce enough information in the
output to let the reader look up the referenced work, so it isn't really
a citation.

Second, it would be difficult to get the formatting of these selected
fields right in general.  Should titles be emphasized, or put in
quotes?  When do we insert commas between fields? etc.

Instead, I think Org should provide functions that provide the same
aid to document authors without the indirection, functions like:
  - org-get-fields-from-citation
  - org-insert-fields-from-citation-at-point
  - org-replace-citation-at-point-with-fields
These would take care of looking up the desired data in the reference
database and inserting it into the Org document, where the author
could format it as desired.

Furthermore, if someone *really* needs the indirection, I think it
would be relatively straightforward to implement as an export filter,
especially if the above functions are provided.  This case should be
uncommon enough that users can be expected to handle it themselves.

So, unless someone thinks it's really important to find a workable
solution, I hereby drop this (the `field selectors') part of my
proposal.  That means citations in the inline case can remain fully
compatible with Pandoc.

Best,
Richard