Hi,
Working on the next issue of the CG Journal, I finally had a good reason to
look at the new bibliography code. Even with a big manual, it was still a bit
of challenge.
The article I was working on was written for mkii, and came with a prebuilt
.bbl file for that (but not with the original .bib files). The original
databases look like they were created for latex so there were some problems
with embedded commands and it being 8-bit (ISO-latin), but that was to be
expected.
Some other problems seems to be more related to differences between the mkii
and the mkiv bibliography code.
First question: is there a ‘default’ or ‘standard’ dataset, or not? If so, is
it named ‘default’ or ‘standard’? The bit of code on the wiki and the actual
manual seem to disagree on that. My current solution looks like this:
\usebtxdataset[h-all-forced.bbl]
\usebtxdefinitions[aps]
\setupbtxrendering[alternative=aps]
…
\placelistofpublications[criterium=text]
That works, but almost all the documentation uses either [default] or
[standard].
Second question: It appears I need both \usebtxdefinitions and
\setupbtxrendering, which surprised me. I understand that right now, there is
only ‘apa’ and ‘aps’, but it seems neither are preloaded? Without the
\usebtxdefinitions, I did get a list of publications, but with horrible
formatting, especially for ‘manual’ and ‘inproceedings’.
Contrary to what the manual says, \cite[key] does not seem to work. however,
\citation[key] does. So, in the preamble I now have
\let\cite\citation
but isn’t it weird that I needed that?
More importantly (read: "more timeconsuming-ly"), there are some differences in
the .bbl processing compared to mkii, which is not great. So far, I found this:
* mkii used \arttitle in some spots. To be exact: in ‘article’, ‘incollection’,
and ‘inproceedings’ entries. I changed the ones in ‘article' to \title inside
the .bll to get these to work.
* That fixed ‘article’s, but ‘inproceedings’ and ‘incollection’ are broken,
because these *also* has an actual \title for the complete
proceedings/collection, and I do not know how to make the module display both
titles. Please help, because I definitely need the ‘inproceedings’ one to work
properly! I now get formatted output like this:
[18] J.-M. Hufflen, Proc. 6th ConTEXt Meeting
& EuroTEX 2012 (2012).
(actually twice the exact same entry, because there were two articles by J-M in
that one proceedings). Do I need \booktitle?
Not that I mind, but it is a little odd in the sense that a ‘collection’ has a
title, but it is not really a ‘book title’, it is a ‘collection title’ (and
likewise for 'proceedings’) ;)
* In mkii, the bbl uses e.h. \artauthor[]{John}[J.]{}{Doe}. The problem I have
there is that the new biblio code (at least the ‘aps’ version) inserts dots
after the initials in the output list, So I end up with “J.. Doe”. I like the
‘adding a dot’ in principle, but if it stays, then it should definitely be
conditional on whether or not the initials already have one. Having to edit the
datafile the fix the double dot was quite uncomfortable.
* I had to change the .bbl, replacing all \pubyear with \year. The extra \pub…
prefix was there because of conflicts with the primitive \year in mkii and it
makes sense to not require it any more in mkiv, but nevertheless it would be
helpful if \pubyear could be used as an alias to \year. Not the hardest change
though, it was a single global replace in the bbl, so a low priority request.
* The new ‘aps’ style does not print the publisher name for ‘book’ (at least, I
probably missed others). I assume this is because of the ‘not quite ready yet’
state of new biblio code, but I hope that will be fixed at some point. And
there are probably a few other (less common) fields still missing, right?.
Probably because the .bbl uses e.g. \pubname, not ‘\publisher’? I don’t want to
go looking for these missing fields just now, but I would be willing to do at
some later date.
Finally: the manual says there are various ‘required fields’ for the entry
types. That is great, but could there be some (optional) visual feedback in the
formatted list if such a required field is in fact missing? traditionally, that
would a black square, but a bold *publisher missing* would be very useful.
That’s it for now. Sorry about the long list of complaints. I do appreciate the
amount of work needed to get bibliographies working even without having to
worry about backward compatibility, but I feel it is important that, if there
is supposed to be backward compatibility, that it ten be as close to perfect as
technically possible. Even if it is a bit of pain.
Best wishes,
Taco
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