I am very eager to see this work of yours, Christian. I also would very much like to find a way to have a single, well-supported citation framework in org -- I certainly think John's work looks incredible, and zotxt is very powerful, but it would be fantastic if one could just choose a bibliographic backend and export seamlessly to any supported format. It would be a big step forward. I guess I don't quite see, yet, what has to happen for the work of various contributors to be consolidated; clearly Erik, You, and John have worked in overlapping and distinct directions, but I would be veyr enthusiastic about helping a unified approach emerge, espeically one that supported Zotero.
Thanks everyone, Matt On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Christian Moe <m...@christianmoe.com> wrote: > > Richard Lawrence writes: > > > 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. > > It's been years since I looked at Pandoc, and I think they've added some > functionality since then. Prefix, locator, suffix, and multiple > references in one human-readable citation: Great! And /much/ nicer to > look at than latex \cite commands with their frankly bizarre placement > of locators etc. > > > Blah blah [see @doe99, pp. 33-35; also @smith04, ch. 1]. > > In my current homebrewn solution for Zotero, I have tried to do > something similarly readable using Org link syntax (sorry, Rasmus!) with > the database entry ID as link target, and parsing the description part > for prefix/author-date/locator/suffix, but with a slightly different > syntax than Pandoc uses. In my solution the above would be: > > Blah blah [[zotero:0_A43F89;0_E25CB3][(see: Doe 1999: p.33-35; also: > Smith 2004: ch. 1)]]. > > > 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]. > > In my current Zotero solution: > > Smith says blah [[zotero:0_E25CB3][(2004)]]. > > > Does anyone have citation needs that this syntax doesn't cover? > > It's great, as long as your database uses mnemonic citekeys like > doe99. Zotero doesn't, but uses keys that are meaningless to humans, > like 0_A43F89. Unfortunately [see @0_A43F89, p. 5] wouldn't look nearly > as nice as [see @doe99, p.5], and it wouldn't help you remember what you > referenced. > > I think the typical workflow combining Zotero with Pandoc is to export a > BibTex file from Zotero and reference the BibTex citekeys from > there. I could live with that much of the time. > > But that workflow doesn't help with something I often want to do, which > is to export to ODT and have 'live' Zotero citations that I can continue > to work with in LibreOffice. > > > 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. > > That's a good point. OTOH, don't Org users convert their documents with > Pandoc mostly because cross-backend citation support is lacking? > > > 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. > > Possibly more work if it's worth if we adopt Pandoc syntax, > since Pandoc-citeproc seems to handle nearly everything that is based on > plain text. > > To truly support citations natively, we'd essentially have to implement > something like citeproc in elisp. Not that I haven't been thinking about > that... > > Yours, > Christian > > > > > > >
