citeproc

This library generates citations and bibliography formatted according to a CSL style. Currently version 1.0.2 of the CSL spec is targeted.

This library is a successor to pandoc-citeproc, which was a fork of Andrea Rossato's citeproc-hs. I always found it difficult to fix bugs in pandoc-citeproc and decided that implementing citeproc from scratch would give me a better basis for understanding. This library has a number of other advantages over pandoc-citproc:

• it is much faster (as a rough benchmark, running the CSL test suite takes less than 4 seconds with this library, compared to 12 seconds with pandoc-citeproc)

• it interprets CSL more faithfully, passing more of the CSL tests

• it has fewer dependencies (in particular, it does not depend on pandoc)

• it is more flexible, not being tied to pandoc's types.

Unlike pandoc-citeproc, this library does not provide an executable. It will be used in pandoc itself to provide integrated citation support and bibliography format conversion (so the pandoc-citeproc filter will no longer be necessary).

At this point, the library still fails some of the tests from the CSL test suite (105/845). However, most of the failures are on minor corner cases. And because the library already passes many more CSL tests than pandoc-citeproc did, it seemed worth publishing an early version even before all these bugs are ironed out.

How to use it

The main point of entry is the function citeproc from the module Citeproc. This takes as arguments:

• a CiteprocOptions structure (which currently just allows you to set whether citations are hyperlinked to the bibliography)

• a Style, which you will want to produce by parsing a CSL style file using parseStyle from Citeproc.Style.

• Optionally a Lang, which allows you to override a default locale,

• a list of References, which you can produce from a CSL JSON bibliography using aeson's decode,

• a list of Citations (each of which may have multiple CitationItems).

It yields a Result, which includes a list of formatted citations and a formatted bibliography, as well any warnings produced in evaluating the style.

The types are parameterized on a CiteprocOutput instance a, which represents formatted content in your bibliographic fields (e.g. the title). If you want a classic CSL processor, you can use CslJson Text. But you can also use another type, such as a pandoc Inlines. All you need to do is define an instance of CiteprocOutput for your type.

The signature of parseStyle may not be self-evident: the first argument is a function that takes a URL and retrieves the text from that URL. This is used to fetch the "indendent parent" of a dependent style. You can supply whatever function you like: it can search your local file system or fetch the content via HTTP. If you're not using dependent styles, you can get by with const Nothing.