Re: [PATCH][oc-csl] Improve reference parsing

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

András Simonyi <andras.simonyi@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, 2 Nov 2022 at 07:28, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:
>
>> I do not think that CSL limitations are really limiting us.
> ...
> I'm not really familiar with the internals of the Org exporter but,
> looking at the ox.el code, macros and babel calls are processed and
> resolved before processing citations, so they seemingly have no
> bearing on the org-cite-csl--parse-reference function my patch is
> concerned with.

> Other than macros and babel calls, e.g., timestamps, LaTeX  fragments
> etc. the problem is that citeproc-el expects and needs the affixes and
> locator to be passed in the very limited html-like markup supported by
> CSL (see https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/rich_text_bibliography for
> a rudimentary description), and, crucially, the assumption is that
> everything else is plain text, which, if necessary, will be escaped
> according to the target format, i.e., '$' signs are escaped by
> citeproc-el's own LaTeX formatter. The reason for this limitation is
> that the affixes and especially the locator have to be parsed into
> citeproc-el's internal rich-text representation for further processing
> according to the used CSL style. (Affixes are only concatenated to
> other elements but locators can be the subject of any type of
> formatting.)  As a consequence, I think the only real alternatives are
> using a custom backend as I do in the current patch or a backend
> derived from the plain text Org exporter -- I don't have a strong
> preference as to which solution we choose, just went with the
> seemingly more minimalist option. (The proper way of dealing with
> LaTeX fragments in this context, in particular with LaTeX math
> fragments, would be to support those in citeproc-el's internal
> representation and markup, which is planned but not implemented yet.)

Could you please explain in more details why CSL require special
export of the prefix/suffix? What will happen if we simply pass the Org
markup verbatim?

I am asking because org-cite-csl-render-citation uses
org-cite-parse-objects so, unless citeproc does something terrible with
the original Org syntax, we can re-parse the output string and export
appropriately according to the current export backend.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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