Re: pandoc/citeproc issues: multiple bibliographies, nocite, citeonly

[John MacFarlane <fiddlosopher-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

+++ Andrea Rossato [Nov 23 10 00:21 ]:
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 11:32:29AM -0800, John MacFarlane wrote:
> > There's a proposal at
> > 
> >     http://gitit.net/PandocCitationGrammar
> > 
> > that would address (2-4) by requiring the user to put an explicit
> > 
> >     <references />
> > 
> > tag where the bibliography goes; this would then turn into a list of
> > works cited since the last <references />.  It would include attributes
> > to "omit" or "include" citation keys.
> 
> I think it would be nice if we could follow the way citeproc-js deals
> with this problem:
> 
> http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html#selective-output
> 
> This is basically a list of ("field","value") tuples for selecting
> entries include in or exclude from the bibliography (there are four
> commands: include/select or exclude/quash depending on whether all or
> any of the tuples are to be matched).
> 
> What do you think?

That sounds very flexible.  How would the syntax work?
Maybe:

<references src="mybib.bib">
  <select type="book" categories="1990s" />
  <quash author="Smith" />
</references>

> > (I suppose we could even have a "source" tag that specifies the
> > bib file to use, but this would only work if we no longer had to
> > read the bib file prior to parsing the markdown -- see the previous
> > "issue".)
> 
> What about parsing the markdown text for the reference field, if
> present read the source file with the bibliographic data and then
> parse the actual markdown text?

This could be done, but there'd be a significant performance
penalty, so I'd rather avoid it.

> > We could address (1) as well by adding a special Bibliography block
> > to pandoc.  This would have some cost, as each writer would have to
> > be told how to treat it, but it would give more flexibility. For
> > example, in HTML, the bibliography could be put in a special
> > <div>. (Note that with the current system, if you want your bibliography in a
> > div, you can put it in a section and use the --section-divs option.)
> > 
> > I'd like to get some feedback on whether we want this flexibility,
> > or whether the current simple behavior sufficies.
> 
> There would be also some specific needs for bibliographic formatting
> to be taken into account, like second field alignment or per-author
> listing. See more about it here:
> http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#id73
> 
> I must admit I didn't have yet the time to dig into those issues and
> I'd prefer to leave them for future enhancements. I think we should
> focus on getting the citation part right, first, since it involves
> syntax modification. The bibliography, instead, is a matter which does
> not affect the way documents are written.

Yes, it seems fine to wait on refining the formatting of the
bibliography. But we ought to settle the issues above about how
a writer indicates where the bibliography goes, what its source
is, etc.

John