Re: wip-cite status question and feedback

[Bruce D'Arcus]

Just one question, Richard ...

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 5:50 AM Richard Lawrence
<address@hidden> wrote:

[...]

> I think it is worth pointing out to Bib(La)TeX users that it is useful
> to avoid a proliferation of citation commands in Org syntax. The syntax
> discussed so far achieves this by "factoring out" formatting information
> that BibLaTeX puts into the command into other parts of the syntax and
> into the choice of citation stylesheet. For example, instead of having
> \footnotecite and \parencite as separate commands, you can just have a
> single cite command, and the choice of stylesheet determines whether
> citations get formatted as footnotes or as in-text parenthetical
> citations or as something else.

Before the question, I did just want to add that this is an excellent point.

[...]

> My experience is that it's typically just two (e.g. parenthetical and
> author-in-text), and my memory of the earlier conversation was that most
> people agreed.

Just to align what you're saying and what I'm saying:

I see three commands in the pandoc syntax: standard/parenthetical,
author-in-text, and suppress-author; that look like so:

[@doe17]
@doe17
-@doe17

Implicit in what you wrote is the last one is not needed.

The question, then: Is that what you're saying; we don't need suppress-author?

I think I actually agree, though will add a topic that came up in the
CSL implementation discussion for the author-in-text styles in the
past few days.

Here's a common way a citation might be integrated in a narrative text:

Doe, by contrast, found negative results (2017).

So we have the author name in-text, than some text, then the year-only citation.

The traditional way to do that in pandoc is to use the suppress-author
command at the end.

Doe, by contrast, found negative results [-@doe17].

So the piece of information I refer to above is that one of the CSL
implementers (Frank Bennett) figured out  how to make the above
example an author-in-text variant, so that you don't need
suppress-author, and the entire sentence is the citation.

He did this by adding an optional "infix" variable to the citation.

So in that example, you would have:

- command: "author-in-text"
- citekey: "doe17"
- infix: "by contrast, found negative results"

This is arguably an edge case, but it does relate to the question of
whether we need two (standard and author-in-text) or three commands
(adding the suppress-author).

One could make the reasonable argument (I think, though not everyone
would agree) that the workaround for the above example is to use
author-in-text command but restructure the sentence:

@doe17, by contrast, found negative results.

>From that perspective, I guess we indeed need only two commands:
standard (parenthetical) and author-in-text.

Bruce