Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal

[Stefan Nobis]

address@hidden (Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo) writes:

> I see, so in the examples provided Doe99 is only the key, org would
> not have to know that the author name is Doe and its year is 1999,
> or any other information about the citation.

Yes and no. In the first place org should only get a special syntax
for citations. That means there will be special data structures for
citations and backends get a uniform interface for these parts of the
source text. In the simple case that's all, i.e. the backends get more
information to generate the correct commands (in the case of LaTeX) or
to call some tool that will generate the text/object to be inserted in
the resulting document.

On the other hand org should be able to show additional information
for citations, like linking to its data (in some bib file, in zotero
or wherever). But that's a second step.

> But now it is not clear to me what the actual org reference points
> to. If it is the actual reference, I mean the article's PDF or URL,
> what would you do when you need to cite a physical book?

The org element, say "[cite: see @doe99]", will point to some
data source, to be defined in the same org document (e.g. with
"#+BIBIOGRAPHY:..."). This data source for citations may be a bib
file, a zotero database, maybe even Endnote or something else.

As said above, org will not handle every aspect of citation. It should
only know a little more about these things in order to enable some
extra features (e.g. special UI for citations or exporting citations to
different backends instead of the need to fallback to LaTeX commands).

-- 
Until the next mail...,
Stefan.