Re: [Docutils-users] Scientific article example

[Paul T. <pau...@gm...>]

On 10/17/11 8:14 AM, Alan G Isaac wrote:
> On 10/17/2011 2:58 AM, Nicolas Rougier wrote:
>> the transformation is made based on the citation
>
> You can get much of this functionality from bibstuff.
>
> But your post is a reminder:
> As things stand, restructured text does not support
> citations with instance specific data (e.g., page number).
> It would be great to add a discussion of how to add data
> that for now at least all writers feel free to ignore.
>
> Here is one proposal: how about allowing braces-enclosed
> arbitrary text at the end of the citation.
> This is not actually ugly. Maybe it is
> not too hard to modify DU to handle?  E.g.,
>
> [imauthor-2011-jdu{page:55}]_ ...[imauthor-2011-jdu{page:99}]_
>
> would generate only one citation (to imauthor-2011-jdu) but
> the default would be to include those two distinct pieces of
> text in the citation references.
>
> Resolving this one issue would be a breakthrough for
> citation handling.
>
>
But what if the citation requires other information, such as a volume 
number? I think a more flexible solution would involve CSV within the 
citation:

[imauthor-2011-jdu 55 X "Spring and Summer"]_

The first field would always point a key to the full bibliographic 
reference; the second, to the page number (the most often used), the 
third for the volume, and so fourth. I did a lot of work with 
bibliographic references some time back, and I remember how many 
exceptions there are to a standard entry.

The advantage of CSV is that it is readable. In most cases, the entry 
would consist of a key followed by a space, followed by a number. In 
addition, CSV is understood by almost everyone, and is very easy to 
parse without having to write lots of extra code.