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

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

+++ Andrea Rossato [Nov 24 10 21:51 ]:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 09:06:32PM -0800, John MacFarlane wrote:
> > PS.  I'm sorely tempted to put off implementing these complexities
> > til later, and release a simple version of pandoc/citeproc that just
> > constructs a bibliography of works cited in the document and puts
> > them at the end, more or less the way it does now.  The one twist
> > I'd add would be this:  the bibliography is inserted only if the
> > document ends with a Header.  That way you could suppress the
> > bibliography by not ending with a Header.
> 
> If you do not want a bibliography you can just remove the
> <bibliography> element from a style. This is the cleaner way to do
> it I think.

Makes sense.

> > We could keep this convention later even if we implemented a
> > <references /> element. So existing documents would not break.
> > 
> > What we'd be missing:
> > 
> > - ability to have multiple bibliographies
> > - ability to include works not cited in bibliographies
> > - ability to suppress works cited in bibbliographies
> > - ability to filter bibliographies by fields (e.g. source=primary)
> > 
> > These things would be nice for some users, but they add a lot of
> > complexity and could be implemented later.
> 
> I'm working to get the filtering options done. citeproc type signature
> must be changed and I'd prefer to do it before a new release (since
> the API has already been changed).
> 
> citeproc would become:
> 
> citeproc :: ProcOpts -> Style -> [Reference] -> Citations -> BiblioData
> 
> with
> data ProcOpts
>     = ProcOpts
>       { bibOpts :: [BibOpts]
>       }
> 
> (the record could be extended at a later time). And:
> 
> data BibOpts
>     = Select  [(String, String)]
>     | Include [(String, String)]
>     | Exclude [(String, String)]
>     | Quash   [(String, String)]
> 
> (the tuple is (field,value))
> 
> Multiple bibliographies would require calling citeproc for everyone.
> This means splitting the pandoc document - in other words, partially
> rewriting Pandoc.Biblio.
> 
> Can we do it now? If no I'm not going to work on the citeproc side any
> longer for the time being.

There's at least one thing that needs to be done anyway -- the
spacing issue between multiple locators.  (See the failing
tests when you do 'make test'.)

> For the syntax: I like the xml syntax you proposed.

I'm a bit uncertain how to proceed, because the xml syntax seems
unpopular (judging from responses on the list), and I don't have
a good alternative in mind.

Also, I'm not *sure* that the select/include/exclude/quash system
is the best way to go on filtering.  It works pretty well with
the xml syntax, but less well with some of the other options.

Hence the temptation to avoid solving all these problems and
just release something workable. But let me think on it some more.

John