"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdar...@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 10:41 AM Max Nikulin <maniku...@gmail.com> 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. > >> - improve documentation, e.g. to make backend choice more conscious. > > This is the bigger user-facing issue that could use attention. > >> Another point is more serious. Besides citations there are internal >> cross-references. Org supports them but only in a rudimentary form. > > Indeed, the question of how to better support cross-references in org > is an important one. > > I don't really use them much, and so am still unsure if this could be > addressed with incremental improvements in existing org link support, > or if it would require more significant enhancements. No incremental improvement is required IMO, regular links are sufficient. org-ref has handled these with regular links from the beginning. It even has an org-ref-refproc now for non-LaTeX exports that has some support for things like sorting, grouping and cleveref. You can find an example org file at https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref/blob/master/examples/refproc.org, and see it in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRR-5NSpKyE the video has some rough spots, but you can get the idea. You can support all kinds of things in these links (for example, I now support pre/post note text in the cite link paths), really anything you want to parse out of the path. > > Perhaps we need the community to itemize what the gaps and limitations > are there? > > > Bruce > >> Actually cross-references are similar to citations in the sense that >> they can have style, prefixes and suffixes, and their appearance depends >> on target properties. Another feature is grouping. However >> cross-references should not be handled by citation backends, they >> require different handlers. Unfortunately there is no way to define >> custom "citation" type e.g. "[ref:...]" in addition to "[cite:...]". >> >> I can not judge if uniform UI issues are really severe and if it would >> be convenient if depending on prefix argument either org-cite or org-ref >> command would be called for a citation or for a reference. >> >> Actually "[cite:...]" construct is a kind of link with additional >> flexibility missed for regular links. Anything besides target and >> description requires some workarounds. Usual approach is proliferation >> of link types. E.g. inline source blocks allows almost arbitrary extra >> parameters. Citation syntax is rather domain specific, it allows more >> than regular links, but for convenience the set of properties is fixed: >> style, prefixes, locators, suffixes. It is impossible to add extra one. >> >> To assign additional properties, info "(org) Links in HTML export" >> https://orgmode.org/manual/Links-in-HTML-export.html recommends usage of >> "#+ATTR_HTML", but such technique has several issues: >> - attributes becomes specific to the export backend >> - the same attributes are added to the enclosing paragraph >> https://linevi.ch/en/org-link-extra-attrs.html >> - a paragraph may have more than one link. >> It is possible to use link target similar to form values encoded into >> URI, but it hardly can be considered as convenient for editing. >> >> Custom citation types may alleviate the issue with cross-references. It >> would be great to have more flexible links with arbitrary properties >> (and it would allow to consider citations and cross-references as >> special cases of links), but it does not fit into the Org syntax. >> >> P.S. John has a valid complain but it hardly relates to the "cite vs. >> cross-reference" topic. When some package is not loaded and link type is >> undefined then the link becomes a fuzzy one leading to user confusion. >> >> -- 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 Pronouns: he/him/his
