Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[Aaron Ecay]

Hello all,

I’ve pushed an update to my branch.  The major change is to use
citeproc-java for the generation of the bibliography and the parsing of
names.  The former is straightforward.  For the latter, I have created a
CSL file which outputs author-year citations in an easy-to-parse format.
These are then slurped by org, and used to fill in printf-style
templates.  Some people mentioned using citations as generated by
citeproc-java directly.  However, I don’t believe this is reliable since
(as also mentioned), it is difficult to control whether a certain style
uses parentheses around a citation or not, whether the citation is
capitalized*, the insertion of prefixes/suffixes within the parentheses,
etc.  So I think the only solution is to implement the formatting of the
in-text portion of citations ourselves, and use citeproc-java only to
extract authors and years.

* NB neither my branch nor the parser currently handles capitalized
  citations either.

Using citeproc gives us for free sophisticated disambiguation of authors
that share a last name (by adding first initial) or works by the same
author in the same year (by adding a letter suffix to the year).

My code still does not implement numeric or footnote citations.

It’s hard to keep straight all of the traffic in citation-related
threads.  I’ll try to respond to what I see as the major points raised,
but I apologize if I inadvertently skip something.

Some people have talked about supporting other CSL processors.  I don’t
see much utility in that, since CSL is a standard that all processors
should implement faithfully.  I judge the java implementation to be the
most complete and cross-platform.  With respect to Zotero, it is possible,
through the “lookup” facility I’ve implemented, to implement fetching of
bibliography data from Zotero.  I merely do not want to talk to Zotero (or
other tools) for the *formatting* of the data.

Rasmus <http://mid.gmane.org/address@hidden> writes about the
insertion of punctuation by biblatex.  I’ve noticed it too, and it’s a
thorny problem.  Perhaps the best and easiest solution is to say that
org-latex documents must do \renewcommand{\postnotedelim}{} in their
preamble.  (Thanks also to Rasmus for discussion of points I raised in
previous mails about reftex and org syntax.  I have no specific reply
but the responses were all extremely helpful.  I haven’t had time to act
on any of them because I’ve been concentrating on citeproc support.)

I haven’t updated the branch to the new multicitation syntax yet, but
thanks as always to Nicolas for working on it.  I think that is next on
my list, along with getting biblatex support completely ironed out.

I have not had much time to study Vaidheeswaran’s jabref integration
code.  In any case I would be hesitant to do so until there is
confirmation of the code’s copyright status, since he(?) sometimes posts
to the mailing list using an email address belonging to Jambunathan,
who at some points in the past was not willing to provide copyright
assignment.  However, it would be good to know:
1. Is any important functionality lost by using citeproc-java as the CSL
   processor, rather than jabref?
2. Is it possible to support for implement importing citations from
   jabref through the “lookup types” facility in my code?
3. How are citations formatted for export to ODT?  An example of the
   ODT/XML code for something like “as demonstrated by Smith (2015)”,
   where “Smith (2015)” has whatever fancy formatting a citation is
   expected to have in ODT, would be helpful.

I’m sorry that I do not have enough time to both work on the code and
participate very much in the discussion.  But reading it has been quite
helpful to me in creating the code, so thank you all.

Finally, the attachments demonstrate the output from ascii export of a
sample document + bibliography (in org-bibtex format).

Aaron Ecay





1 Section one
=============

  Here is a citation (Smith 2015) .

  Here is another with parens J. Doe (2016b).

  Here is one with a prefix and suffix (see Smith 2015 and other such
  works).

  Here is one with a prefix and suffix and parens see Smith (2015 and
  other such works).

  Here’s a citation to demonstrate the disambiguation of names: (B. Doe
  2016) .

  And the disambiguation of years: (J. Doe 2016a) .


2 Bibliography
==============

  Currently the bibliography keyword doesn’t create its own section.

  - Doe, Bill. 2016. “Work Three.”
  - Doe, Jane. 2016a. “Work Two Bis.”
  - ———. 2016b. “Work Two.”
  - Smith, John. 2015. “Work One.”

doc.org
Description: Lotus Organizer

bib.org
Description: Lotus Organizer

--
Aaron Ecay