15.2 Citation export processors ¶

Org currently includes the following export processors:

• Two processors can export to a variety of formats, including ‘latex’ (and therefore ‘pdf’), ‘html’, ‘odt’ and plain (UTF8) text:

  basic

  a basic export processor, well adapted to situations where backward compatibility is not a requirement and formatting needs are minimal;

  csl

  this export processor uses format files written in Citation Style Language via citeproc-el;

• In contrast, three other processors target LaTeX and LaTeX-derived formats exclusively:

  bibtex

  this export processor uses BibTeX, the historical bibliographic processor used with LaTeX, thus allowing the use of data and style files compatible with this processor (including a large number of publishers’ styles). It only supports LaTeX’s ‘\cite’ and ‘\nocite’ commands.

  natbib

  as with the bibtex processor, but using the LaTeX package ‘natbib’, allowing more stylistic variants that LaTeX’s ‘\cite’ command.

  biblatex

  this backend allows the use of data and formats prepared for BibLaTeX, an alternate bibliographic processor used with LaTeX, which overcomes some serious BibTeX limitations, but has not (yet?) been widely adopted by publishers.

The ‘CITE_EXPORT’ keyword specifies the export processor, citation style, and bibliography style; for example (all arguments are optional)

#+cite_export: [export processor name] [bibliography style] [default citation style]
#+cite_export: basic author-year author

specifies the ‘basic’ export processor with citations inserted as author’s name and references indexed by author’s names and year;

#+cite_export: csl /some/path/to/vancouver-brackets.csl

specifies the ‘csl’ processor and CSL style, which in this case defines numeric citations and numeric references according to the ‘Vancouver’ specification (as style used in many medical journals), following a typesetting variation putting citations between brackets;

#+cite_export: natbib kluwer

specifies the ‘natbib’ export processor with a label citation style conformant to the Harvard style and the specification of the Wolkers-Kluwer publisher; since it relies on the bibtex processor of your LaTeX installation, it won’t export to anything but PDF.

#+cite_export: biblatex numeric,backend=bibtex

specifies the ‘biblatex’ export processor with the default ‘numeric’ style and the ‘bibtex’ backend. Always define the style first and then the rest of load-time options for the ‘biblatex’ package. Alternatively, you can use the key=val,key=val format for the options as documented in the ‘biblatex’ package documentation:

#+cite_export: biblatex backend=bibtex,style=numeric

The org-cite-biblatex-options variable in your Emacs configuration uses this format. It will only export to PDF, since it relies on the biblatex processor of your LaTeX installation.