Thank you. But we entertain ideas from anyone, whether they own Bookends or not (of course, many of these suggestions don't make it to the to-do list, but again that's independent of ownership).
Well, then just assume I registered Bookend, because I need a good bibliography tool (which is true).
To be clear, what are you requesting exactly? The ability to have a formatted citation contain another citation, formatted differently? That, in fact, would not be a trivial addition.
To answer this, allow me to refer to bibtex tutorial from 1988, pg.2-3:
http://www.uni-kassel.de/hrz/server/Sof ... bibtex.pdf
Two things happen [1. inheritance of missing fields, 2. inclusion of the cross-referenced reference]
...the special crossref field tells BiBTeX that the NOGNATS entry should <b>inherit any fields it's missing</b> from the entry it cross-references...
Perhaps you might be able to implement something similar to what BibTeX does; the format could be specified in one type of reference, the missing fields inherited from an entry specified in a special XREF field (perhaps with a similar syntax used now in the wordprocessing program). As far as I can see, this might mean an additional query per reference insertion...
And, if you could get this to work for conference proceeding, I am sure it would be tweakable (using a USER field) to work for reprints, as well.
I hope this clarified my wish - if not, I can try again.
hartmut