On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 8:29 AM Nicolas Goaziou <m...@nicolasgoaziou.fr> wrote: > > Hello, > > "Bruce D'Arcus" <bdar...@gmail.com> writes: > > > The question comes down to whether to support sub-styles or not, and > > if yes, what the syntax should be. > > > > I think it makes more sense to include them because otherwise you end > > up with an insanely long list of styles, which won't map well onto > > different kinds of output formats. > > I think only oc-citeproc (and oc-basic) may be targetting multiple > output formats. I doubt it would even use styles; I assume that is > entirely determined by the CSL file.
Actually, no; it's determined (mostly) by the processor. A CSL style defines a single default citation layout, which the processor modifies depending on what variants it supports. So most of them support a citet-like option, but it's currently implemented in the processor; not the style. > > E.g. biblatex users will want like 20 commands available, which won't > > all work with other formats. > > So you would have 20 styles, with shortcuts for the most commons. This > is not insane, and the mapping is done only once. In the UI I'm working on for inserting org-cite citations, I have the small handful of styles, that users can complete. https://github.com/bdarcus/bibtex-actions/pull/113 It's simple, and clean; the list of style fits on a single line. Aside: no, I'm not currently planning to include sub-styles here; was thinking to allow users to add them after if needed. But that could change of course. These will work across the different output formats we've discussed, so I don't need to add different config options for different targets, and user documents don't have to change to accommodate them. > Styles do not need to be compatible between processors. As a reminder, > there's the "fallback rule". According to it, each processor must: > - provide a default styles; > - map any unknown style to the style above. OK, but that is only a single required default style then. ... > > Even if not perfect, I think it's a small price to pay for the > > benefits. > > I'm still not convinced by the benefits. Could you describe a situation > where sub-styles would be really beneficial? Say a natbib user has a document, maybe even a book, that makes common use of the text style + some examples of sub-styles. They want to export that document to both HTML and to PDF. Using styles + sub-styles means she can use the same source to get both; the first using the citeproc-org processor, and the second oc-natbib. Admittedly, a long list of flat styles could still accommodate this (I think), but I go back to my UI and config point above. Do note my suggestion on the previous message that we could simplify sub-styles and still get these benefits. I do agree it's not necessary to treat sub-styles as an unordered list. WDYT of that? Bruce