Re: wip-cite status question and feedback

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 1:38 PM Richard Lawrence
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> "Bruce D'Arcus" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> >> > My understanding, though, is that org "cite" would default to your
> >> > last example I quote above (in natibib, citep); that there's no need
> >> > for a dedicated "cite/paren" command, either reserved or not.
> >>
> >> Not necessarily. "cite" means default value, whatever that is. It could,
> >> for example, mean: "cite/text" for every citation, if that is what you
> >> use the most. In that case, "cite/paren" is necessary, to override it
> >> locally. It could also be, e.g., "cite/footnote", then both "cite/text"
> >> and "cite/paren" could be of some use. That was suggested by Richard
> >> Lawrence in this thread, if my memory serves me right.
> >>
> >> Does that make sense?
> >
> > I think so. I'll defer to Richard on this, since he was making this point.
>
> Sorry to take so long to reply. The point I made earlier was that, as
> far as I understand, the choice of CSL stylesheet is the main factor
> determining how a given citation gets rendered into the output (assuming
> you process citations with CSL). So yes, it makes sense to have "cite"
> mean default value as determined by the choice of stylesheet.

I was trying to not assume CSL in this discussion, but certainly
that's how I was thinking.

> I've been skimming the CSL documentation, and I'm realizing that I
> actually don't have a very good understanding of how these different
> types of commands would be represented at the level of a CSL processor.

Yes, because it's currently silent on this issue. In part because of
this conversation, we've decided to add a section that deals with this
in the context of a generic API.

> Bruce, is it possible to have a CSL stylesheet that would be able to
> accommodate both e.g. "cite/paren" and "cite/footnote" in the same
> document?

No. We could extend CSL to do that, but I don't actually recall ever
getting that request.

> Can a stylesheet support an arbitrary numbers of different
> citation types like this, and can a CSL processor choose among those
> types based on their *names*?

CSL currently has a single citation template, so effectively one
system, defined in that style file.

CSL is silent on the rest, since we wanted to see how the ecosystem
evolved to respond to user needs. We left it up to the implementers on
how to address integrating.

But per above, we have enough information at this point to make the
silent explicit.

Based on that, what we have seen is what I've described here: two core
commands (cite and suppress-author), and now a third iteration of that
which we will add explicitly to the spec and schema in the next
release: the equivalent of citet.

This turns out relatively simple to implement by building on existing
CSL concepts, where output becomes, for example, "[author-only] " +
"([suppress-author])".

This is already supported in CSL, but we will add a new "intext"
element to allow one to define the author-only rendering for styles
(like APA) where the output is different than it is in the citation.

So to sum up, I expect we will explicitly define three commands:
default (the one defined in the citation template of the style),
suppress-author (which need not be explicitly defined in the style,
since the processor knows how to achieve this), and cite-text.

> If so, then I think Nicolas' proposal to have "cite" mean default and
> make non-default citations available as "cite/xxx" makes sense
> (especially with the other syntax supporting suppress-author, etc.).
>
> If not, then the "cite/xxx" syntax makes less sense to me; it just sort
> of looks like a different way of writing BibLaTeX commands, and will be
> hard to support when LaTeX is not the output format. I would be hesitant
> in that case to make "cite/xxx" the standard way to express "this
> citation should be rendered in manner xxx, instead of the default".
>
> Best,
> Richard