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

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

On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 10:42 AM Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 21/03/2022 22:19, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 10:41 AM Max Nikulin 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.
>
> John Kitchin, this thread, Sun, 20 Mar 2022 20:31:29 -0400.
> https://list.orgmode.org/m2sfrc149c.fsf@andrew.cmu.edu:
>
> > I don't know the equivalent of \citenum in CSL.

Right; so John or someone else should send a message to the list
requesting it specifically?

That's how we've done it so far anyway. Not sure what the practical
alternative is.

I will say that much of this discussion is not about org-cite per se,
but rather implementation decisions in the specific bundled
processors. I fear these conversations get hard to track if we aren't
precise about what we're talking about; citation syntax, included
processor functionality or style mappings, documentation, etc.

>  From my point of view it may be a reason to add a new style to
> defaults. It is important whether a tool works out of the box.

But the question here becomes "works for whom?" Citations practices
vary a fair bit by field.

Primarily LaTeX/natbib users like John and other science folks,
biblatex users primarily coming from the humanities as near as I can
tell? Or people coming from markdown and pandoc (which has an
excellent citation system that clearly inspired org-cite) and needing
Word-ready documents for journals etc?

The style system in the bundled processors is designed to work for all
of them, and not privilege one or another. It does this by creating a
new, more general, org-cite style and variant system, which then maps
to different targets.

That approach has obvious advantages: citations are (mostly) decoupled
from particular export processors. One can write a document with these
styles, and get PDF citation and bibliographic output via biblatex,
for example, similar to the HTML or ODT output from the CSL export
processor.

And that also has advantages beyond org. For example, pandoc recently
added support for org-cite, and that includes mapping between the two
style/command systems. So in theory you could convert an org file to
docx, letting pandoc process the citations along the way, and the
result would more than acceptable.

> Custom variables make a document less portable unless they are specified as
> file-local ones.

Indeed!

Or more specifically here, it ties the citations to the export processor.

But maybe for some or many people that's perfectly fine.

One possible idea to consider is to allow two systems in each of
LaTeX-oriented processors: what we might call a default "org-cite"
one, and an optional "literal" one. So if you only use oc-natbib, and
you want the natbib commands directly, you might change a variable to
get that.

I really don't know if that's a good idea or not, but I raise it to
emphasize there's a lot of flexibility with the org-cite design, and
so it's just a question of how we make use of it.

> I think, the goal may be formulated as "John can not
> say the following any more" (at least in respect to citations leaving
> aside cross-references):
>
> > I simply cannot
> > compromise on the capability org-ref provides me, or wait for an
> > alternative complete solution in org-mode.

I don't really see why these are the two choices.

> On the other hand I do not consider the following argument as a strong one
>
> > I do not like the abstraction away from LaTeX cite commands in org-cite.
> > This is an example of a compromise between LaTeX and CSL.
>
> despite I believe that convenience and habits are important. Mapping of
> styles to commands is just a piece of knowledge.

Yes.

> I have no particular opinion if enough efforts should be invested from
> both sides to allow mixing on both citation syntax constructs (org-cite
> and org-ref) in the same document. Bruce, you made a lot for support of
> CSL in org-cite, so I will stressed another direction of feature
> comparison since Bib(La)TeX users should feel themselves first-class
> citizens.

Absolutely! In fact, Denis Meier, who has extensive biblatex
knowledge, helped a lot with the initial mapping there, and some other
biblatex users have contributed feedback along the way.


Bruce

> The choice between org-ref and org-cite, when the former can do its job,
> should be matter of taste and personal preferences unrelated to
> technical limitations.
>
>