On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 6:23 PM, Richard Lawrence <
richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Hi Nicolas and all,
>
> Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:
>
> > Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:
> >
> >> Yes, this is my understanding, too.  In particular, there does not seem
> >> to be an Elisp CSL library, and it would be a lot of work to write
> >> one.
> >
> > Here is a genuine question: what is the difficult part, or if there is
> > none, the longer parts of the work? AFAIU, CSL is XML and we can use
> > libxml for the low-level parsing.
>
> I can't speak to how difficult it would really be.  But I do think it
> would be a lot of work, and tedious, unglamorous work at that.
> Essentially it means implementing the CSL specification:
>
> http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html
>
> The specification describes the XML format for CSL styles, which IIUC
> are something like XSLT programs: they describe how to transform an
> input document tree into an output document tree.  So, implementing CSL
> is something like implementing a very special-purpose declarative
> programming language, which has to handle declarations about every
> detail of citation formatting (where to put periods, how to capitalize
> names like "von Neumann", whether to use "&" or a translation of "and"
> for the current locale, etc.).  Lisp is a good language to do this kind
> of thing in, but parsing the XML is surely the easy part.
>
> > Could you give some examples of the UI offered by the citeproc-hs
> > library?
>
> The library I ended up wrapping is actually pandoc-citeproc, which is a
> fork of citeproc-hs (which seems to be unmaintained).
>

The obvious advantage to pandoc-citeproc is that it keeps us close to
pandoc, and it would be good to encourage as much compatibility as possible
with those guys.

The disadvantage is that, from what I can tell, the javascript
implementation is the canonical version of citeproc, and the place where
improvements are pushed first.  So, for instance, if one wanted to
implement an org-syntax output format for citeproc, citeproc-js would be
the most likely project to support that work.