Re: More questions about CSL and org-mode

[John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Richard Lawrence writes:

> Hi John,
>
> John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This is mostly for the people working on citations in org-mode.
>>
>> I have been reading about CSL more this weekend. IIRC, one of the
>> reasons to develop the new citation syntax was to get the ability to
>> have pre/post text in citations more conveniently than what is currently
>> possible.
>
> Yes, that is my understanding, too.
>
>> I have not seen any possibility for this with CSL, however. Is my
>> understanding correct? Is this a problem, or something partially handled
>> by org-export and partially by a citeproc?
>
> The CSL processors I've looked at support prefix and suffix text for
> individual references within a citation.  See, for example, the
> citeproc-js documentation:
>
> http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html#citation-data-object
>
> prefix, suffix, and some other fields are supported.  pandoc-citeproc
> supports the same set of fields.

Interesting. I guess these are not standard for all processors? It also
looks like it would be hard to get something like an inline reference
formatted as [1] but refer to Reference 1, e.g. from citenum. It is
possible to have (Kitchin 2007) and (2007) but not a citation reference
to Kitchin that is derived from e.g. a citeauthor command in LaTeX. I am
not raising any objections here, just getting a sense for what is
feasible.

>
> However, my understanding is that neither citeproc-js nor
> pandoc-citeproc support a BibLaTeX-style "common" prefix/suffix that
> belongs to the citation as a whole, rather than the individual
> references within it, as is available in the multi-cite commands.  We
> currently have support for such common prefixes/suffixes in Org syntax.
>
> My solution to this in my org-citeproc wrapper for pandoc-citeproc is to
> prepend the common prefix to the prefix for the first reference in a
> citation, and append the common suffix to the last reference.  This is
> not a great solution, because it is not really defined what kind of
> punctuation (if any) should separate the common prefix from the first
> item's prefix, and so on.  But I figured that was not an important issue
> to address until we actually have people making use of common prefix and
> suffix syntax who are not exporting to LaTeX...

agreed.

>
>> IIUC, the current aim is to get a citeproc that will do the following on
>> export:
>> 1. replace in-text citation syntax with org-formatted replacements
>> 2. Insert an org-formatted bibliography somewhere in the document
>> 3. proceed with org-to-something export, with built-in
>> exporters.
>
> That's basically my understanding too.  There is one snag with the
> "org-formatted replacement" plan, though, which I saw in a Zotero dev
> discussion yesterday.  CSL processing might result in multiple levels of
> formatting, e.g. nested italics like
>
> <em>Something with an internal <em>Title</em></em>
>
> and that won't translate very well back to Org syntax in general:
>
> /Something with an internal /Title//
>
> The suggestion was to just use HTML output, and then parse the HTML to
> get a data structure that could be directly rendered into HTML, LaTeX,
> etc., which support nested italics just fine.  I think we could do this,
> though maybe there's a better solution.  That is, we can take HTML from
> the citation processor and go directly to org-element objects, without
> producing and re-parsing citations in Org format.

--
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu