This is an idea related to an issue John Kitchin and I were trying to sort out a few months back, that he mentioned in another thread.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2022-03/msg00274.html The question is how to help users understand the relation between oc styles and target output. There are two places where this matters: 1. selecting the style (say in a completion list) 2. previewing the citation after the fact (for example, hovering over it in the buffer) On 2, right now in oc-basic, if one hovers over a key, one gets a tooltip preview of the rendered bibliographic entry, which is very handy. Picking up an idea that John mentioned in the above message, would it be feasible when hovering over the prefix (the part before the colon) to get a preview of the citation? By "feasible" I mean a good idea from a UX POV, and without any obvious performance penalties. As for the point he raises about which export backend to preview, perhaps that should just be via a "citation-preview" defcustom? So if one selected, say, natbib, one would see something like "\textt" in the tooltip. On 1, in citar I currently have a UI with a grouped list of style/variants, and a user-defined static preview for each, something like this: --------- default ------------ / (de Ville, 2020) ... ----------- text -------------- /text de Ville (2020) /text/caps De Ville (2020) ... So I'm just wondering how best to dynamically generate those previews, perhaps even just using a pre-selected reference*, and if maybe oc could make that easier? * One wrinkle in general here is that in the LaTeX intermediate export targets, you really don't care about the reference data, or even the key; you just care about what the command is. With the CSL rendered output, you do care about that. Bruce
