Include et al. to output of \cite command with \nonumcitations

[pabloabur]

Hi,

I've been playing with _citeA and _printsavedcites, hoping to insert "et al." between author name and year (e.g. Last et al., 2023 instead of default Last, 2023), but with no success. Do you have any similar examples or suggestions about this? I tried looking at the code and documentation, but I guess my TeX skills are not good enough!

[olsak]

Please, give a minimal example. Then I can get this code and start playing with it. And I will better understand the context, what do you want to achieve.

[pabloabur]

I'm coming from ConTeXt, and there I could specify that if there are three authors or more, the output of \cite would be the first author only, followed by et al., year. So in the MWE below, I get

Cite 3 authors: [Lastone, 2023]
Cite 4 authors: [Lastfour, 2023]

But what I wanted was

Cite 3 authors: (Lastone, Lasttwo, and Lasthree, 2023)
Cite 4 authors: (Lastfour et al., 2023)

And I also wanted a way to print only the year within parenthesis e.g. Lastfour et al. (2023). I could perfectly do this by using \ecite or \bib[label]={mark}, but I was wondering whether I could use **_namecount** and \bibmark to define an alternative \cite command. It could avoid typos and inconsistent citations across the text, but is it worth the effort?

Thank you for being so helpful

MWE
test.tex:

\fontfam[LMfonts]
\nonumcitations

Cite 3 authors: \cite[short]\par
Cite 4 authors: \cite[long]

\bigskip
\usebib/s (simple) biblist
\bye

biblist.bib:

@ARTICLE{short,
    title="Short title",
    author="Lastone, One and Lasttwo, Two and Lastthree, three",
    year="2023"
    }

@ARTICLE{long,
    title="Long title",
    author="Lastfour, Four and Lastfive, Five and Lastsix, Six and Lastseven, Seven",
    year="2023"
    }

[olsak]

Now, I understand the problem. You means \cite outputs when \nonumcitations is set. On the other hand, the "et al." is printed as expected in bib-reference list, we have the aumax option for this case.

I'll look at this problem soon.

[olsak]

I tried to solve it by the commit 2e5741b

[pabloabur]

Yes, it works when I use github source code instead

[olsak]

I create a release sometimes (about per three months). You can see releases in the github commits history. On the other hand the unreleased actual version (with + at the end of the version number) is available only at github. The OpTeX web site says that the last zip file 111 (equivalent to the release 1.11) is from "9 Mar 2023" but my commit 2e5741b which solves your problem is from "24 March 2023". The new release 1.12 was not created.

[pabloabur]

I see. I totally missed that.

Just out of curiosity, in the code posted in optex tricks

   \def\_createbibmark #1;#2,#3;#4,#5;#6,#7;#8,#9\_fin{%
      \ifx ^#8^%
        \ifx ^#6^%
           \ifx ^#4^#2%
           \else #2, and #4\fi
        \else #2, #4, and #6\fi
      \else #2, et al.\fi
      \space (#1)%
   }

Does the argument surrounded by ^ (e.g. ^#8^) check whether that argument is empty? I couldn't find this type of notation on my TeX references, so I don't know how this works

[olsak]

Yes, \ifx ^#8^ is test, if #8 is empty. When it is true then the code expands to \ifx ^^ and the first token is equal to second token, the conditional returns true. If #8 isn't empty and doesn't start with ^ (we are sure about this because the author name cannot begin with this math-mode operator), then the first token ^ isn't equal to the second token. The conditional returns false and skips following tokens to the relevant \else primitive.

[pabloabur]

Beautiful, I understand it now. Thanks!