Re: [wip-cite-new] Merging tomorrow?

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

On Thu, Jul 8, 2021 at 9:43 AM Timothy <tecosaur@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Nicolas,
>
> > At this point, I don’t have enough understanding of the problem to have
> > an opinion. IIUC, your example does not even mention citations. How
> > should it be used, what should be the output in LaTeX, and in UTF-8
> > export? This is not clear to me.
> >
> > What can I say however is: if this feature implies to change, or extend,
> > syntax, then it is /de facto/ a blocker for the merge, and needs to be
> > sorted out.
>
> This very much depends on how you view references vs citations. I personally
> think of references as in-text citations (i.e. you’re citing other bits of the
> very same document), but I doubt this is a common view (as suggested by other
> replies).

I'm glad you raised the question, even if it is a bit late. But I
indeed don't think your view is common :-)

I decided to take a look at what a canonical guide like Chicago Manual
of Style says about this.

They call these "text references" (though confusingly, they use the
word "references" when discussing citations too).

For example, there are headings like "3.9: Text references to numbered
illustrations". or "2.30: Formatting text references and callouts to
tables and illustrations".

And then descriptions like "A text reference is addressed to the
reader (“see table 5,” or “fig. 3.2”) and will appear in the published
version."

Here's some stuff from APA, though they don't go into references much.

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/figures

And finally, FWIW, MS Word and Open/LibreOffice implement support for
this via "cross-references":

https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=283073&p=1888264

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/Using_automatic_cross-references

So they may be similar, but are not the same.

And the implementation challenges raised by John Kitchin and Joost
Kremers (namely the candidate list is different) make this better to
deal with using a different mechanism.

As a package developer that supports org-cite, I really don't want to
be worrying about internal references and such.

And as a user, I don't see the benefit of doing so.

Effectively, these seem more like org internal links.

Bruce