jjmccollum
commented
2 years ago Full support for the pagination entry field will depend on whether or not the ConTeXt team is able (and willing) to implement support for specifying default field values for a given category. That said, the primary focus of this issue will be the implementation of a CSL parser.
If we assume that a CSL locator will be specified as the argument of the \loc or \altloc macro in the righttext option, then a reasonable way to proceed would be to temporarily redefine the \loc and \altloc macros according to the category of the current entry (e.g., an inreference or inbook entry would serialize the \loc argument after the shorthand of the parent reference, if there is one, while an ancienttext entry would serialize the \altloc argument after the title of the ancient text and the \loc argument in parentheses after a short citation of the cross-referenced source). These macros would parse their arguments (in lua, most likely, using a regex search for the locator abbreviations), store the parsed locator values in temporary variables accessible on the TeX side, and serialize these values appropriately according to certain checks (does the current entry have a shorthand, does the cross-referenced entry have a shorthand, does the cross-referenced entry have volume and part numbers that need to be prefixed to any cited page numbers, etc.).
Of course, it's possible that a righttext value might not include a \loc or \altloc call, so we also have to detect that up front and intelligently determine what we need to serialize in the citation. All in all, it's more complicated than I'd like it to be, and it makes me wish that ConTeXt publication support were more programmatic. But is this basically the idea you had in mind, @denismaier?
denismaier
In the early development of the SBL publication support module, I attempted to reserve the use of the
lefttextcitation option for alternate citations (to be used, for instance, in passage citations from ancient/classical works) and that of therighttextoption for page, section, paragraph, etc. numbers. This is obviously a bad decision from a portability perspective, as it prevents users from switching from some other specification to SBL with minimal changes to their TeX code. The main reason was that I wanted to avoid ambiguity between when things like page numbers were properly being cited and when thelefttextandrighttextfields simply had plain textual content.The process of cleaning up my code (not to mention the insightful comments of @denismaier!) has made it clear that some degree of parsing must be applied to the
lefttextandrighttextfields. Probably the best convention to implement at this stage of development is that of CSL locators (https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#locators), and in particular, the short forms defined in https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales. In line with the ConTeXt philosophy, these locators and their abbeviated forms are defined for many languages and can implemented in such a way as to facilitate multilingual usage.As an example, if we wanted to cite a portion of the Clementine Homilies 1.3 that is found in book 8, page 223 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, we would use something like
The parser would look for patterns beginning with the locator abbreviations (here
bkfor book,chfor chapter, andpfor page) and contextually define the\altlocand\locto typeset these references in a specification-dependent way. (For SBL, the\altlocoutput would be "1.3", while the\locoutput would be "8:223".) It's also important to note that for some entry categories (like@ancienttextand@classictext), these references may not be typeset with the rest of therighttext(i.e., the "for further details" part); indeed, for the example above, they would be split into separate parts of the citation:If no
\locor\altloccommands can be found in therighttext, then the parser should check if any prefix of therighttextis a number or range. If there is one, then it should be rendered using the appropriate default locator. Typically, this will be "page", but which locator we consider "appropriate" may be decided through a series of fallbacks, in the following order:paginationfield containing a valid locator (in long form, such as "book", "chapter", "page", etc.), then that locator should be used. (This is in line with the usage proposed in the biblatex manual §2.3.12.)@manual, for instance, this might be "section"), then that should be used. (This would have to be implemented somewhere, but I'm not sure where...in thepubl-imp-[spec].luafile, perhaps? Can entries in a given category be auto-populated with default values for fields in that script?)Any part of the
righttextthat is not matched by the parser in either of the previous checks should be printed as-is in the usual place for therighttext(i.e., at the end of the citation for the corresponding entry).This is a pretty extensive proposal, and since it should be broad enough to be applicable to all bibliographic specifications (not just SBL), it would likely involve changes to code in the ConTeXt core (particularly
publ-ini.lua,publ-ini.mkiv,publ-imp-cite.mkvi, andpubl-imp-default.mkvi). For this reason, it may be better to create a separate repo for implementing and testing these changes. If we decide to do this, I can resolve this issue and copy its contents to the new repo.