Re: More questions about CSL and org-mode

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

Hi John,

John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> This is mostly for the people working on citations in org-mode.
>
> I have been reading about CSL more this weekend. IIRC, one of the
> reasons to develop the new citation syntax was to get the ability to
> have pre/post text in citations more conveniently than what is currently
> possible.

Yes, that is my understanding, too.

> I have not seen any possibility for this with CSL, however. Is my
> understanding correct? Is this a problem, or something partially handled
> by org-export and partially by a citeproc?

The CSL processors I've looked at support prefix and suffix text for
individual references within a citation.  See, for example, the
citeproc-js documentation:

http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html#citation-data-object

prefix, suffix, and some other fields are supported.  pandoc-citeproc
supports the same set of fields.

However, my understanding is that neither citeproc-js nor
pandoc-citeproc support a BibLaTeX-style "common" prefix/suffix that
belongs to the citation as a whole, rather than the individual
references within it, as is available in the multi-cite commands.  We
currently have support for such common prefixes/suffixes in Org syntax. 

My solution to this in my org-citeproc wrapper for pandoc-citeproc is to
prepend the common prefix to the prefix for the first reference in a
citation, and append the common suffix to the last reference.  This is
not a great solution, because it is not really defined what kind of
punctuation (if any) should separate the common prefix from the first
item's prefix, and so on.  But I figured that was not an important issue
to address until we actually have people making use of common prefix and
suffix syntax who are not exporting to LaTeX...

> IIUC, the current aim is to get a citeproc that will do the following on
> export:
> 1. replace in-text citation syntax with org-formatted replacements
> 2. Insert an org-formatted bibliography somewhere in the document
> 3. proceed with org-to-something export, with built-in
> exporters.

That's basically my understanding too.  There is one snag with the
"org-formatted replacement" plan, though, which I saw in a Zotero dev
discussion yesterday.  CSL processing might result in multiple levels of
formatting, e.g. nested italics like

<em>Something with an internal <em>Title</em></em>

and that won't translate very well back to Org syntax in general:

/Something with an internal /Title//

The suggestion was to just use HTML output, and then parse the HTML to
get a data structure that could be directly rendered into HTML, LaTeX,
etc., which support nested italics just fine.  I think we could do this,
though maybe there's a better solution.  That is, we can take HTML from
the citation processor and go directly to org-element objects, without
producing and re-parsing citations in Org format.

> The current contenders for a citeproc are Zotero and Pandoc.
>
> Has anyone looked at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/citeproc-py/
> or https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc-ruby
>
> The ruby one looks pretty advanced.

I haven't looked at them closely.  My impression was that the Python
version was quite incomplete; and unfortunately, I don't know Ruby, so I
would be the wrong person to evaluate it (or write code for it).

Best,
Richard