Re: Citations, continued

[Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de>]

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:

> I know these commands are convenient, and that not having them would
> introduce this class of errors, but the question is whether they are
> so important that it's worth providing an equivalent for them in
> non-LaTeX backends.

Hmmm... I don't see this as a big problem. Either the exporter or some
tool has to be able to read from the bibliography database and has to
understand at least parts of the available fields (e.g. author and
year to enable author-year style citations). Based on this it should
be easy to only output some of the fields (e.g. only author).

> For my part, it seems like the convenience is not worth the effort
> that would be required to make the exporter handle these correctly
> in general. (For example, it seems the exporter would then have to
> worry about things like quoting and emphasizing document titles --
> which means worrying about context, document type, locale and
> language, quotation styles, etc.)

Does the exporter really habe to worry about these things? But anyway:
Some tool is needed to generate the bibliography with all its data -
this tool has to handle all these details and therefore it should be
not too hard to get partial data from it. BTW: I don't think any
special formatting should be required - ASCII or even HTML would never
look the same as a LaTeX generated PDF. So minor drawbacks are IMHO
not as important as to be able to express important details in the
source.

I think, the syntax should be quite flexible (at least easy to extend,
with compact, nice looking extension-syntax). If some backend lacks
support for some feature, maybe someone finds the time to fix it (and
then org-mode would rule the world :)). Otherwise a simple fallback
(default citation style, output citation string unchanged,...) will be
used.

-- 
Until the next mail...,
Stefan.