Re: org-cite and org-citeproc

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

Hi Richard,

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

> Hi Tom and all,
>
> tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye) writes:
>
>>> OK, I see, that makes things clearer.  Would it make sense to have two
>>> keywords, say LATEX_CITE_STYLE and CSL_FILE or similar, so that the
>>> style can vary independently when exporting to LaTeX vs. non-LaTeX?  I'm
>>> thinking it will be tricky to come up with a single set of values for a
>>> CITATION_STYLE keyword that can be correctly mapped to both kinds of
>>> backend.  Or maybe CITATION_STYLE should have "sub"-keywords, like
>>>
>>> #+CITATION_STYLE: biblatex:authoryear csl:chicago-author-date.csl
>>
>> Won't the backends sort this out without the additional mapping?
>
> Surely they could, but I guess I'm unclear on how that should happen.
>
> Org could keep a variable mapping citation styles to default values for
> the respective backends, like:
>
> (defcustom org-cite-citation-styles
>   '(("author-year" (biblatex-pkg-args "citestyle=authoryear,bibstyle=authoryear")
>                    (csl-file "/path/to/chicago-author-date.csl"))
>                    ...))
>
> so in a document, you could just write
>
> #+CITATION_STYLE: author-year
>
> or similar.  Is this what you have in mind?
>
> That seems like a good way to provide reasonable defaults using a
> high-level label.  But I think using a high-level label like this will
> underdetermine the actual style to use (on both sides, I assume); and
> the problem is that if we make the labels more fine-grained, there's no
> longer any guarantee that, for a given style label, a suitable style
> file will be available on both LaTeX and non-LaTeX backends.
>
> There obviously needs to be some mechanism so authors can specify their
> citation style quite precisely for the backends they are interested in.
> (Maybe just customizing this variable would do the trick.)  But what
> should the fallback mechanism look like when a particular style does not
> specify the required information for a given export backend?  E.g., if
> CITATION_STYLE is X and we're exporting to HTML, but the entry in
> org-cite-citation-styles does not specify a CSL file for style X?  Would
> it be enough to have a single 'default clause or similar in
> org-cite-citation-styles to use in that kind of case?

I was thinking the author would change CITATION_STYLE to fit the export,
but I like your idea of setting up a universal configuration.

As for a fallback mechanism, I like your idea of a user-configurable
default.

All the best,
Tom

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com