Re: [Docutils-users] bib4txt

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2009-12-04, Alan G Isaac wrote:
>> On 2009-12-04, Alan G Isaac wrote:
> On 12/4/2009 3:22 PM, Guenter Milde wrote:

>> How does bibstuff replace the "citekey" with the "display key" (say
>> [isaac.schwilk-2010] -> `Isaac and Schwilk (2010)`) in the reST
>> document?

> On Windows::

>          bib4txt.py -ai rst_input.txt -o c:\temp\temp.txt example.bib

Sorry, I was not interested in the invocation command but the result:
What rst markup is inserted by bib4txt to get the reference Isaac and
Schwilk (20010), say. Simple text, a custom role, a hyperlink, ...

>> How does bibstuff replace the "citekey" with a numbered key in the
>> References?

...

Again, I am interested in the result (there is no example in the examples).


>> Are there reasons to use the citation syntax ``..
>> [isaac.schwilk-2010]`` in the generated References file also if the
>> key is not used?

> So ..., this is not currently completely settled.  I am currently not
> making such substitutions in this manner, so I have not been trying to
> settle it. (It is actually my view that docutils HTML writers should
> handle the substitution, and some future date.)

Citation database (e.g. bibtex) support should be handled by a transform,
not writer specific. Writers with native support (like latex2e) can
opt-out (similar to --use-latex-toc supressing the contents transform).

> For now I find advantage to having to using the reST syntax for
> citations, since this provides a clear visual clue in the text file
> and additionally leads to formatting as a citation by the HTML writer.

Then, for graceful degrading (i.e. consistent view with less advanced
browsers), the original key in the citation reference should be kept as
well (and set to "non-visible" via CSS). (I don't know if this is already
the case, the examples have no example.)

> I actually think the numbered example should also do this, but that
> will look very weird in the text file and in any converted file that
> does not turn off the label display, so I do not currently plan to
> change this.

It is indeed unfortunate, that the very common numeric labeling of
citations with brackets (``[1]``) implies footnotes in rst.

However, a citation transform could change the labels even to a numerical
format while keeping the type of the citation-reference and citation
nodes (as it comes after the syntax parsing).

Günter