Re: citations: org-cite vs org-ref 3.0

["Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 10:41 AM Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:

...

> A bit of routine work will alleviate some user issues:
> - add missed styles

The initial list of style-command mappings was pretty comprehensive,
but we left out some of the more obscure biblatex commands because
unsure if they were needed, or how best to add them (conceptually
there's a mix of different kinds of commands in biblatex, which are
hard to fit into a more general style system, for example).

Since then:

- people have occasionally asked to add new mappings, and Nicolas has added them
- he's also added the styles defcustoms for biblatex, so users can do
this themselves

In short, I think we're good on this actually.

> - improve documentation, e.g. to make backend choice more conscious.

This is the bigger user-facing issue that could use attention.

> Another point is more serious. Besides citations there are internal
> cross-references. Org supports them but only in a rudimentary form.

Indeed, the question of how to better support cross-references in org
is an important one.

I don't really use them much, and so am still unsure if this could be
addressed with incremental improvements in existing org link support,
or if it would require more significant enhancements.

Perhaps we need the community to itemize what the gaps and limitations
are there?


Bruce

> Actually cross-references are similar to citations in the sense that
> they can have style, prefixes and suffixes, and their appearance depends
> on target properties. Another feature is grouping. However
> cross-references should not be handled by citation backends, they
> require different handlers. Unfortunately there is no way to define
> custom "citation" type e.g. "[ref:...]" in addition to "[cite:...]".
>
> I can not judge if uniform UI issues are really severe and if it would
> be convenient if depending on prefix argument either org-cite or org-ref
> command would be called for a citation or for a reference.
>
> Actually "[cite:...]" construct is a kind of link with additional
> flexibility missed for regular links. Anything besides target and
> description requires some workarounds. Usual approach is proliferation
> of link types. E.g. inline source blocks allows almost arbitrary extra
> parameters. Citation syntax is rather domain specific, it allows more
> than regular links, but for convenience the set of properties is fixed:
> style, prefixes, locators, suffixes. It is impossible to add extra one.
>
> To assign additional properties, info "(org) Links in HTML export"
> https://orgmode.org/manual/Links-in-HTML-export.html recommends usage of
> "#+ATTR_HTML", but such technique has several issues:
> - attributes becomes specific to the export backend
> - the same attributes are added to the enclosing paragraph
>    https://linevi.ch/en/org-link-extra-attrs.html
> - a paragraph may have more than one link.
> It is possible to use link target similar to form values encoded into
> URI, but it hardly can be considered as convenient for editing.
>
> Custom citation types may alleviate the issue with cross-references. It
> would be great to have more flexible links with arbitrary properties
> (and it would allow to consider citations and cross-references as
> special cases of links), but it does not fit into the Org syntax.
>
> P.S. John has a valid complain but it hardly relates to the "cite vs.
> cross-reference" topic. When some package is not loaded and link type is
> undefined then the link becomes a fuzzy one leading to user confusion.
>
>