Re: [wip-cite-new] Initial implementation of `csl' citation processor

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

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:

> By default, no export processor is selected. All citations are
> removed from output, and print_bibliography keywords, ignored.

As I'm coming from LaTeX and have been bitten more than once by
missing citations in the output (which is solved far better today by
biblatex), I would say this is not a very good default.

Citations should never be removed (or only with quite some effort). If
you publish a text where citations have been removed by accident,
that's asking for much trouble.

Therefore I would suggest to set some sensible default that at least
does not remove citations. For example a simple ASCII export with
number or author-year style could be the default citation export for
all back-ends. For quite some users (e.g. non-academic, internal
white-papers etc.) this may be also a "good enough" solution, so they
get easy citation support OOTB.

Everyone else would choose some more sophisticated back-end.

> It could be possible to change `org-cite-export-processor' so it
> becomes an alist where you can associate back-ends to processors.
> But I can't see how to transpose it nicely to cite_export keyword.

What about "cite_export" for a single/default export engine and
"cite_export_<backend>" (with "<backend>" something like "html",
"latex", "md", etc.) for overriding the citation exporter for the
given back-end, e.g.

cite_export ascii
cite_export_latex biblatex chicago
cite_export_html csl "some style"

(I forgot about the correct syntax for cite_export, so just a really
rough sketch to illustrate the idea).

Would that be feasible?

> I'm not convinced this would be an improvement either. For example,
> you may want to use two different processors with the same back-end.

I'm not sure if this is true for many back-ends. Currently, I would
assume that this is only the case for the LaTeX back-end (e.g.
preparing a paper for different journals with different citations
requirements). But in this case LaTeX has already quite some tools
that could be utilized. All the different kinds of citation commands
are there to be able to easily switch styles for the whole document
(within a single back-end).

I think what I'm trying to say is, that for the simple Org user it may
be easier to handle peculiarities of his back-ends (like HTML and
LaTeX) that it is for him to write custom Elisp to use exporter A for
HTML and exporter B for LaTeX.

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