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

[Tillmann Rendel <rendel-BsSq14ewkJTuP3AoR1hMncu21/r88PR+s0AfqQuZ5sE@public.gmane.org>]

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;[...]

I like the idea of explicitly specifying where the bibliography goes. I 
don't like that syntax too much, however, because

  (a) it is HTML-focused, so it might look awkward in LaTeX-target
      markdown files with lots of literal LaTeX code

  (b) it looks like literal HTML, but is actually (pandoc extended)
      markdown, which might be confusing


I had a similar problem in my use of pandoc. I want to insert 
system-generated content, such as a table of contents, at a specific 
point in the document. So I decided to write a script which replaces a 
whole section (or subsection etc.) with system-generated content, based 
on the name of the section. So for example, the snippet:

     Table of Contents
     =================

     It doesn't matter what you write here

     Introduction
     ============

would get translated to something like:

     \tableofcontents
     \section{Introduction}

I think this would work well for references, too.


The main benefit is that one can use the input format's syntax for 
headings to specify "special sections" like table of contents or 
references. The input document therefore looks natural. (One could even 
have one's editor and pandoc automatically fill in the section content 
with a textual version of the system-generated data, for some kind of 
semi-WYSIWYG effect).

The main drawback is that the name of the section is relevant, so this 
introduces a language dependency. For my scripts, I just have a 
command-line flag for the various special sections:

   "--toc=Table of Contents"


Of course, I can easily extend my script to translate a 
"References"-section into a "<references/>" marker, so I don't the mind 
the concrete syntax too much.

Just wanted to share my thoughts.

   Tillmann