natbib and biblatex support

natbib and biblatex support

[Nathan Gass]

I started implementing writers and readers for natbib and biblatex
citations in LaTeX (and added a writer for markdown too).

My current tree is at https://github.com/xabbu42/pandoc/tree/citeproc3.

I'll hopefully be able to put something online the next week or so,
where people can test this stuff without having to clone a git
repository and compile their own pandoc. I hope to get more feedback
this way on how this actually ought to work. Until then, I'm of course
happy for all feedback anyway. But if you don't understand the
following text, just wait for the examples to appear online, which
will probably be easier to digest.

Some questions I want to discuss with other people interested
in natbib support on this list:

The natbib writer has as far as I see nothing similar to the citeproc
suppress-author or the biblatex cite* commands. My current solution is
to use \citeyearpar and \citeyear, which does the right thing for
author-year styles, but is wrong for other styles. In other styles a
normal \citep would do the trick. This problem will diminish
considerably, once we have a standard way to represent textual
citations in pandoc. Still there has to be some solution.

Possible solutions I considered are:

1. Another commandline option switching between citeyear and citep.

2. Including our own command in the template, which uses the
    appropriate natbib command.

3. Ignore it (people can either avoid suppress-author by using only
    standard textual cites, use suppress-author together with an
    author-date style or post process the latex file).

4. Somehow determine the style from the template.

I think the writer should output as natural and standard citation
commands as possible, so I tend dismiss number 2. Currently I'm
leaning towards 3. natbib has no support for this case, so why should
we work around this.

I use \citetext and the \citeal* forms to generate complex citations
with many keys, prefixes and locators (suffixes). I currently need to
hardcore some punctuation characters for this to work. Is this the
natural natbib approach (I personally only use very simple cites)?
Could/should I use the punctuation from a style file or a bibpunct
command. How to do this?

Of course there are some biblatex questions too:

I could not test biblatex support until now, so it will probably not
work at all. From the documentation, the \autocite* I use for
suppress-author is only provided with author-year styles. Does the
command exist with other styles and fall back to a normal autocite? If
not we have the same problem as with natbib.

\autocite has support for a global prefix and suffix (which currentyl
are not supported). I assume it is enough to simply add them to the
first prefix and the last suffix?

Greetings
Nathan

Re: natbib and biblatex support

[Nathan Gass]

On 10.11.10 00:49, Nathan Gass wrote:

> I could not test biblatex support until now, so it will probably not
> work at all. From the documentation, the \autocite* I use for
> suppress-author is only provided with author-year styles. Does the
> command exist with other styles and fall back to a normal autocite? If
> not we have the same problem as with natbib.

biblatex support works now with the latest code. Moreover the \autocite* 
command exists in a numerical citation style, so there is no such 
problem with biblatex support as in natbib.

Nathan