Re: pandoc-style citations

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

Hi Alex,

Alex Fenton <alex.fenton@pressure.to> writes:

> I see that there were several extensive and fruitful discussions on this 
> list last year on citation syntax. There seemed to be a reasonable 
> degree of consensus that pandoc-style citation syntax was at the least a 
> good model.
>
> I'd like to know if there are any implementations out there of elisp to 
> parse pandoc citation syntax and turn it into latex \cites. My question 
> is not so much "when/if this will be in org mode" but rather whether 
> there's something I can drop in now (likely as a link type).

As far as Elisp implementations go, I know of no specific parser for
Pandoc citation syntax.  But there is support for a Pandoc-like syntax
(discussed in the threads you read) in the wip-cite branch of Org's
repository.  This provides support for multi-cite citations in Org
syntax, but it isn't hooked up to the export framework at all.

Export is where efforts stalled last year.  Aaron Ecay, Vaidheeswaran C,
and I all worked on different proof-of-concept implementations to hook
up the citation parser to a citation processor and the various
exporters.  This is a non-trivial problem, and it seems that not many
people have a lot of time to work on it (including me), so if you want
to help, that would be great!  Aaron's work is in the Org repository
(see the wip-cite-awe branch).  Vaidheeswaran's is elsewhere; I don't
know where exactly, but you can search the list for a link.  My own is
here, in the wip-cite-rebase branch:

https://github.com/wyleyr/org-mode/.

There is also Pandoc itself, which can read (some) Org syntax.
Depending on what your document looks like, you might have good luck
just using Pandoc to convert it to LaTeX.

> I have a lot of longish citations with multiple references each with 
> their own pre- and post- ("'blah blah blah @ref1, p.23, also @ref2, for 
> a contrary view see @ref3 pp148-152") that end up as \cites. However my 
> home-brew link solution, stuffing the multiple pre- and posts- with 
> separator into the link description is unwieldy - difficult to write, 
> hard to read and easy to get wrong or breaking output.

You may also want to look at John Kitchin's org-ref, which I believe
works similar to your homebrew link solution, but has a lot of features
and may provide a better interface for what you're trying to do:

https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref
 
Best,
Richard