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

[Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 07:25:56PM -0800, John MacFarlane wrote:
> I guess I'm tempted to:
> - allow multiple bibliographies

That would be easy, indeed.

> - specify the source file in the markdown text, as above

keep in mind that multiple bibliographic databases should be allowed
(for instance to mix bibtex and json data).

> I'm not positive this will work, though. As I mentioned, there are technical
> hurdles to having the bibliography file specified in the text. The markdown
> reader itself can't do IO, so it can't read the file. So we can't read the
> bibliography (or even verify that it can be found) until we've parsed the
> markdown source. That means that we can't check potential citations as we
> parse, to see if they're in the bibliography; instead, we have to parse
> everything that might be a citation as a citation. But what if we have a
> citation with id "foo" (from "@foo" in the text), but the bibliography
> contains no corresponding item? Then we need to reinsert the literal text.
> It's easy enough to generate "@foo" from a Cite inline, but what if the Cite
> was generated by parsing latex + bibtex? This gets complicated.
> 
> I did think of one solution, which I'd like to get Andrea's feedback on (as
> it might require citeproc changes). Currently when we parse a citation, we
> just leave the [Inline] part empty; this gets filled in by citeproc when it
> processes the citations with the bibliography.
> 
> My suggestion: instead of leaving it empty, fill in the [Inline] part of the
> Cite with the literal text that should be included in the document if the
> citation isn't found in the database. This way, if citeproc doesn't find the
> item, it can simply leave the Cite alone (rather than raising an error). That
> seems simple; it just adds a bit of complexity to the parsers, which have to
> generate the "replacement text" when they parse a Cite.
> 
> Thoughts?

That would be fine with me. But I just wanted to let you know, though,
that I modified citeproc so that, when a citation is not found in the
bibliographic data, an error is emitted:

   "[CSL BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA ERROR: reference " ++ show (citationId c) ++ " not found.]"

I don't know if this is going to solve your problem.

More generally I'd prefer the metadata approach you were talking
about. If this requires more time to get mature I think we could now
stick with the present approach: a single bibliography automatically
added at the end of the Pandoc document, and multiple bibliographic
databases via the command line --bibliography option.

That would leave us free to take every possible path for implementing
multiple bibliographies and for setting the source biblio data in the
source document.

These are my preferences but I'll just followed your directions.

Andrea