On 1/11/2009 4:13 PM Stéfan van der Walt apparently wrote:
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, this is a problem. In a way, RestructuredText is partially to blame for not providing numerical citation markup.
I do not agree. I cannot think of any bibliography tool that uses numerical citation reference keys. Naturally there are many that *substitute* numerical citation references for the cite key used by the author. This is a *style* question that should be automated (i.e., not be a responsibility of the author). E.g., LaTeX provides a variety of styles for cite key substitution.
If we can come up with a good way of generating the reference keys, we can still change the current format.
This would really involve the following. Create a searchable database of citations and an interface for adding to it. Unique keys would be generated by your algorithm of choice when an entry is added. Authors would be asked to use only references in the database. Desirable for a book. Desirable for documentation?
Maybe the library you mention below can automatically generate such keys? I'd like to take that responsibility away from documentation writers, since it is not always obvious how to generate consistent keys.
Numerical keys will clearly *not* be consistent. The same key will refer to different citations on different pages, and key width will not be uniform. In additional, numerical keys are not informative when encountered by the reader. I would prefer [last1.last2-2009-sja]_ where sja is "standard journal abbreviation" and last names are ASCII (e.g., ø -> o). All lower case. This is very informative and easy for all users. It also means the key is valid for both HTML and XML uses (e.g., as a name or id). But to answer your question, bibstuff includes biblabel.py, which can produce keys for a bibtex database (styled as you like). The problem of setting up the data base remains. Alan Isaac