Re: [PATCH][oc-csl] Improve reference parsing

[András Simonyi]

Dear All,

apologies for replying that late. If I understand the situation
correctly, we could handle the question of allowing macros in
citations independently of the handling of other constructs, because
macros are resolved before processing citations, so they have no
effect on the input of Citeproc-el.  In light of this, maybe there
could be a separate patch for just allowing macros?

As for the question of other elements, I proposed the custom
backend-based approach because CSL has its own rich-text markup (which
is actually not simply a subset of Org's, for example, it contains
small-caps, which is not in Org), and, consequently, Citeproc-el has
its own internal rich-text representations (ASTs), on which it
performs the operations that are prescribed by the various CSL styles.
When the rich text citation/bibliography is finalized, it can be
"serialized" or "formatted" (analogously to Org's exporting a parse
tree) using one of the Citeproc formatters, e.g. into LaTeX, HTML or
Org. As the prefix, suffix and the locator also need to be operated on
by the processor (concatenated to other rich text elements etc.,),
they also have to be parsed into CIteproc el's internal rich-text
representations. Since this is a given, the only question is in what
format should they be passed, and the simple HTML-like standard which
is already supported by Citeproc-el (see
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/rich_text_bibliography) seems to be
the simplest solution.

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:
> Could you please explain in more details why CSL require special
> export of the prefix/suffix? What will happen if we simply pass the Org
> markup verbatim?

Since Citeproc-el assumes that all formatting in the prefix/suffix is
in the HTML-like markup mentioned above, any Org markup would be
treated as plain text which should be preserved as is, and not
interpreted as formatting, so, for example, when an Org document with
underlined text in a citation prefix were exported to LaTeX then the
Citeproc LaTeX formatter would escape the underscore characters ("\_")
to preserve them in the output and the citation would be inserted in
this form into the resulting LaTeX document.

> I am asking because org-cite-csl-render-citation uses
> org-cite-parse-objects so, unless citeproc does something terrible with
> the original Org syntax, we can re-parse the output string and export
> appropriately according to the current export backend.

See above, unfortunately, this wouldn't work, at least not in a
general and safe way.

best wishes,
András


On Sun, 15 Jan 2023 at 09:56, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:
>
> M. ‘quintus’ Gülker <post+orgmodeml@guelker.eu> writes:
>
> > I probably have not much to contribute to this rather technical thread,
> > but Ihor has redirected me here two times for my citation formatting
> > questions[1][2]. So I would like to ask if there is something I can do to
> > accelerate its inclusion into org so that I can start using macros in
> > citations?
>
> András is the author of citeproc.el. I am not sure who else would be in
> position to help us to move this forward.
>
> My understanding of CSL is non-existing. I can only tell that
> citeproc.el has its own implementation of citation export
> (`citeproc-render-citations'), which expects some limited kind of html
> as input. I am hoping that we can somehow work around limited markup
> support of citeproc's implementation and instead leverage ox.el to do
> the job. Otherwise, we will keep stumbling upon citeproc.el limitations
> when exporting bibliography items.
>
> --
> Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
> Org mode contributor,
> Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
> Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
> or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>