Feature request: different citation style in different refsections

[djsutherland]

I'd like to be able to use a different citation style in different refsections. (I don't think this is possible currently, but if there's a clever workaround I'd love to hear that too.)

MWE of how it might look:

\RequirePackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{a,
author = {Person, A.},
title = {On a subject},
journal = {International Journal on a Topic},
year = {1997}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=numeric]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
\begin{refsection}
\Textcite{a} should be numeric.

\printbibliography
\end{refsection}

\begin{refsection}
% some kind of way to change the style
If \textcite{a} could be alphabetic, that'd be super cool.

\printbibliography
\end{refsection}
\end{document}

Reasoning:

I fairly often end up writing papers that have a main body plus an appendix, where the appendix refers to a different set of references: usually not disjoint, but not a subset either. Usually I think the best way to handle this is to have the main body in one refsection, and the appendix in another, with separate bibliographies.

When using a numeric citation style, though, it's not necessarily obvious to the reader that [1] in the appendix is a different source than [1] in the main body. (And I'm often constrained, for conference style or for space reasons, to use a numeric style in the main body.) So if the appendix could use [Aut97] or Author (1997), I think it would be much more obvious to the reader that we've switched bibliographic contexts.

Current possibilities:

It looks like this tex.SE question gives a way to change the way the bibliography is printed (though not the citation style); one could maybe dig through the citation code to do a similar thing, though I haven't looked at that yet.

There's a similar thing here, where @plk commented that "It will never be possible to arbitrarily switch styles in a document - the styles determine too many possible things." So, maybe this feature request has already been turned down as too complicated....

[plk]

I am afraid that is impossible as a style sets up many things very early on and switching them would be very complicated in the biblatex code. This is unlikely to be implemented. However, there are some workarounds I believe - the best place to ask is on tex.stackexchange.com.

[djsutherland]

A note in case anyone finds this issue in the future: I was able to hack this specifically for numeric and alphabetic by making a custom joint style, here, and checking the value of a boolean flag for which output to use inside the relevant bibenvironment/bibmacros. Those two are fairly similar, so it was pretty easy to do.