Rasmus <ras...@gmx.us> writes: > IMO we /need/ to add proper citation support to Org, preferably with a > real syntax rather than these link-"solutions" and with good backend > support (bibtex & Zotero for starters, I guess). > ... > /Proper/ citation support (not links) is, IMO, the last thing that is > missing for good academic publishing support.
Although my home-baked solution presently works for me, I am inclined to agree. I've just had a glance at: http://pandoc.org/README.html#citations It looks to me like Pandoc has a quite general solution, and it also looks like Org could use Pandoc's citation syntax as-is. I would suggest borrowing this syntax as a starting point for building citation support into Org. #+BEGIN_QUOTE Citations go inside square brackets and are separated by semicolons. Each citation must have a key, composed of ‘@’ + the citation identifier from the database, and may optionally have a prefix, a locator, and a suffix. The citation key must begin with a letter or _, and may contain alphanumerics, _, and internal punctuation characters (:.#$%&-+?<>~/). Here are some examples: Blah blah [see @doe99, pp. 33-35; also @smith04, ch. 1]. Blah blah [@doe99, pp. 33-35, 38-39 and *passim*]. Blah blah [@smith04; @doe99]. A minus sign (-) before the @ will suppress mention of the author in the citation. This can be useful when the author is already mentioned in the text: Smith says blah [-@smith04]. You can also write an in-text citation, as follows: @smith04 says blah. @smith04 [p. 33] says blah. #+END_QUOTE Org does use single brackets and `@'-signs for other things (footnote markers, priorities, statistics cookies, inactive timestamps, list counters, inline export snippets -- I think that's it). But these should all be pretty easy to tell apart from citations using regular expressions, so I wouldn't expect parsing this syntax to present any difficulties. Does anyone have citation needs that this syntax doesn't cover? Using this syntax would also have the advantage that Pandoc can already parse it, which would reduce friction for Org users who convert their documents with Pandoc (and Pandoc users who need to deal with Org inputs). Since this seems like a significant contingent of Org users, that's something to consider. The bigger question is whether, in addition to a citation *syntax*, it would be a lot of work to add support for the various citation database formats, as well as the various output styles, and which ones to support. Best, Richard
