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

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

+++ Nathan Gass [Nov 23 10 11:04 ]:
> On 23.11.10 07:30, John MacFarlane wrote:
> >+++ Andrea Rossato [Nov 23 10 00:21 ]:
> >>On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 11:32:29AM -0800, John MacFarlane wrote:
> >>
> >>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.
> 
> Do you have any benchmarks for pandoc? Performance seems to be a
> very important concern for you, while in my usage it never was an
> issue. Of course I neither have large documents to parse nor use
> pandoc in any high-traffic web environment, but I would be
> interested in which region pandoc currently is and how big this
> penalties are compared to that.

I want pandoc to be as fast as possible.  It may not matter if
you're just converting some documents at your desktop, but if
pandoc is used in producing web pages, it can matter a lot,
in terms of response time and server load.

Benchmarks vary a lot depending on your source file.  Here
are some rough figures on one fairly long (178K) markdown file:

Markdown.pl         5 sec
php markdown extra  1.7 sec
pandoc              1 sec
lunamark            0.6 sec
peg-markdown        0.15 sec
discount            0.03 sec

Pandoc does a lot more than lunamark, peg-markdown, and discount,
but still, I think there's lots of room for improvement here, and
the differences are certainly important to people considering
using pandoc in a web app.

> >>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.
> 
> For whats it worth, in my opinion the formatting of the bibliography
> belongs into the style, or some separate pandoc configuration, and
> not in the document itself.

Yes, I think we all agree on that!  But issues about where the
bibliography is placed and what gets put into it need to be addressed
in the document.

JOhn