Re: A minor suggestion about formatting citations

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 11:54 AM Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> 
> wrote:

>> I don't think that's totally true. The additional space makes sense
>> typographically, in particular when some suffix is associated to the
>> key.
>
> Can you give an example of what you mean here? I can't think of one
> off the top-of-my-head.

I mean that it seems natural to write, e.g.,

 [cite:@doe21 p. 1; @doe99]

instead of 

  [cite:@doe21 p. 1;@doe99]

>> Org Cite is unrelated to this. One could as well have inserted spaces
>> manually, i.e., without calling `org-cite-insert' at all.
>
> I know; but you changed the default behavior of 
> org-cite-make-insert-processor.
>
> The OP asked if there were any implications for this generally, and
> I'm just saying "yes, there is."

OK. Then, we are in a violent agreement. :)

> You do have to trim the whitespace on either side of the key, since
> the space is the delimiter. I guess it's not possible for the citation
> parser to ignore the other whitespace?

I'm not sure to understand your question. The space is not the
delimiter; the semicolon is.

For now, the whitespaces are significant for the parser, barring the
leading and trailing ones. It seemed useful for export back-end and
citation processor combinations unable to handle punctuation
automatically (e.g., HTML + oc-basic). I can't tell if they should be
ignored instead.

>> The functions responsible for swapping citations ought to cope with this 
>> situation
>> too.
>
> So check if the content of an affix, for example, is " " (rather than
> whether there's an affix), and adjust accordingly?

I don't think you need to check affixes when cycling citation
references. You could split at ";", trim, re-order, and re-build the
contents inserting "; " between each reference.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou