Re: [AUCTeX-devel] User-customizable RefTeX citations

[Mark Edgington]

Hi Tassilo,

There is already the reftex-get-bib-field command defined within
reftex-cite.el that will get the contents of an arbitrary field of an
entry.  But I guess this isn't globally accessible, so it would need
to be passed to a "reftex-cite-formatter" function (in addition to
passing which entry was selected).

It seems better to have a user-defined formatter function like this
because then one can modify reftex-set-cite-format so that inserting a
reference that depends on a nonstandard field having a nonstandard
format will work by simply choosing your custom citation format, and
then choosing which bibtex entry you want to use from your
bibtex-file.  Adding a separate command that you need to manually
execute after creating the reference feels like a hack that doesn't
integrate smoothly into the standard RefTeX workflow.

As a side note, a nice example of where user-definable citation
formatter functions would be useful is with the workflow / system
described in 
http://tincman.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/research-paper-management-with-emacs-org-mode-and-reftex/
.  If your bibtex file contains the PDF file paths in nonstandard
fields/formats, as mine does, having such formatter functions allow
the field's data to be extracted and manipulated before inserting it
in a citation.

Regards,

Mark