Manual suggestion and experience report from a new user (citation processors, 9.5)

[Leszek Wroński]

Guys,

I've been using Emacs for about 20 years, but I'm only now starting to
seriously explore the Org-mode, since I read about the new citation
options. I'd like to report my initial experience since maybe this
could lead to some amendments to the manual?

Anyway: I installed Org 9.5 from Melpa in Emacs 27.1. I proceeded
through the 'Installation' part in the online manual, so the only
things I put into .emacs were the rudimentary keybindings. I then
switched to the 15.1 Citations chapter and created a file the first
line of which pointed to my library.bib. The introduction to chapter
15 says 'The included “basic” processor provides all four
capabilities.' (w.r.t. 'activate', 'follow', 'insert', 'export'). I
thus assumed that the basic processor was included. However,
org-cite-insert ended with 'Unknown processor basic'.

After reading the list I put "(use-package oc-basic)" in my .emacs.
Since then I can get the citations to appear in my org file. So that's
one thing that could be helpful to new users: even though the citation
processors are included, you have to manually enable them in the
.emacs, e.g. using use-package. [If I'm wrong, please correct me, I'm
new to this and I'm trying to help.]

Another thing: the way the citations work is inconsistent for me at
this point. In some cases, a click on a citation opens my library.bib
at the relevant entry. In other cases, nothing happens (i.e. nothing
that I can see.) On what could this depend?

Ideally I'd like a click on a citation to open the PDF whose location
is stored in the 'file' field of the .bib entry: is there an easy way
to achieve this? [I've tried various ways of doing this in the last
10+ years, including org-ref, RefTex etc., but am I correct in
assuming that currently the idea is that one should only use the
Org-mode for such things?]

Thanks to everyone involved for their hard work!

Best regards,

Leszek Wronski