Can't find CSL in ~/.csl directory *or* follow relative paths to CSL files.

[paultopia]

hi there! So this very old issue for the previous pandoc-citeproc filter suggests that that earlier iteration looked in ~/.csl for style files.

I currently have a ~/.csl directory sitting around containing all 2000-some CSL styles from the central CSL repository. Including, importantly, chicago-author-date.csl. But I can't for the life of me figure out how to actually get citeproc to find that repository.

I started with a defaults file in ~/.pandoc/defaults/research.yaml that contains, in relevant part,

citeproc: true
csl: chicago-author-date

but running pandoc -o testres.pdf --defaults=research markdown.md yields the error File chicago-author-date.csl not found in resource path.

Then I changed it to a full relative pathname: csl: ~/.csl/chicago-author-date.csl

But, same error.

Finally, I gave it a full absolute path, i.e., csl: /Users/myhome/.csl/chicago-author-date.csl and that worked.

Similar errors happen passing relative paths directly from the commandline rather than in a defaults file.

I'm using Pandoc 2.11.4 (installed via homebrew on on Macos catalina, if it matters).

[jgm]

citeproc doesn't look in .csl any more, as documented in the changelog for pandoc 2.11:

• pandoc-citeproc searches the ~/.csl directory for .csl styles. Pandoc instead searches the csl subdirectory of the pandoc user data directory (e.g., ~/.pandoc/csl or ~/.local/share/pandoc/csl). Users who already keep CSL styles in ~/.csl may find it convenient to add a symlink.

[paultopia]

Aaah thank you. Is the relative pathname thing also intended behavior?

(Uh, actually, I mean tilde expansion I guess. sorry.)

[jgm]

Tilde expansion is a shell feature. If you specify a tilde on the command line, the shell will interpret it as your home directory before it is passed on to pandoc. But if you specify a tilde in metadata within your file, it's not interpreted by the shell so it's just...a tilde.

But your question does come up quite a bit, e.g.
jgm/pandoc#5977
jgm/pandoc#3135
A case could be made for expanding tildes in these contexts, I suppose.