Felipe Csaszar wrote: > I only have one disagreement regarding the design of the system. I > believe your system would be much more powerful, simpler, and useful > if it sticks to the Bibtex file format rather than implementing a new > one.
Hi, Felipe, I want to write to support Bruce in trying to throw away BibTeX as soon as possible (take a look at his blog <http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/>, he thought about all bibliographic stuff more than you seem to assume). I have been using LaTeX and BibTeX for all my (not only) academic writing for the last six years (at least) and I have currently 178k BibTeX database where I store all my references. I would say that I am very fluent with LaTeX (wrote a couple of styles for my internal purposes and one -- manuscript.sty -- is available on CTAN), so it is not for the lack of knowledge of benefits and problems of LaTeX/BibTeX, that I am very much looking forward to the day when I could throw them away and switch to OOo (which I cannot do know exactly because of the missing bibliographic support in OOo; alas, I will have to write my thesis in LyX with BibTeX!). Aside from problems with LaTeX (list of LaTeX's deficiencies is long, I have written about some of them on my blog, but it is off-topic here, so I won't leave LaTeX stand as it is). So here are some of my pet-peeves with BibTeX: 1) the most important one (and the one from which most others arise, IMHO) is that BibTeX doesn't provide true database format for its databases. Before, hitting me with obvious, consider please these examples, which are required (or necessary) with BibTeX (all are real-life examples from my BibTeX database), but are completely unacceptable with what I would consider real database data format (IANACSP -- I am not a CS professional :-)): title={Population by Census Tract including Race and Ethnicity in {B}oston and {B}oston's Neighborhoods for the year 2000 ({PL} 94-171 Initial Release)}, Certainly, this is a documented bug in the BibTeX program, not in the database format itself, but it doesn't make things much better :-). And if you want to support BibTeX, then we would have to deal even with this kind of stuff all the time -- otherwise our BibTeX files, would provide different results with OOo and other with the original BibTeX; do we really want to have two separate BibTeX formats? Why then to keep BibTeX format at all? url={http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1992Jul21.120821.29325\%40ms.uky.edu} There are two problems with this example. First one is that I have to backslash perfectly acceptable (according to URL specs) character %. The other one is that url field itself is a non-standard extension of some citation styles, but it is part of the BibTeX itself (among other reasons, because BibTeX as a program is long time unsupported and it was never really developed behind the Patashink's original code). title={Re: Where is the ``Bible Belt''?} This is about problems with character encoding and other i18n issues. First of all BibTeX fail the basic standard of any i18n application (see e.g., <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>) that every string of every document has to always somehow indicated what encoding it is. With BibTeX there is no way, how to use the same database with different documents in different encodings (and no UTF-8 is not solution either, because its support in LaTeX is rather poor). So one has to use TeX-style encoding which is completely proprietary to TeX world (i.e., it is used on only in this one program and nowhere else) and rely on ligatures or really strange codes (my name in Czech is actually Matěj, which would be Mat\v{e}j in TeX). The similar problems are other i18n issues -- sorting according to the Czech technical norms anyone? BibTeX doesn't care and uses only ASC() result for its sorting algorithms, which is really brain-damaged (in the current world, not when Patashnik created original idea for writing of his American CS papers). @unpublished{WBB:1992, author={Wes Morgan}, url={http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1992Jul21.120821.29325\%40ms.uky.edu}, title={Re: Where is the ``Bible Belt''?}, note={Newsgroup post} } Actually previous two examples were all from this BibTeX record. But there is other problem with this record as whole -- BibTeX was created for maintaining references for CS (or any other natural sciences, including math and economics), but it is totally non-extensible and there are tons of unsupported record types -- like this Newsgroups post, which I have hide as @unpublished which is totally misleading and non-informative type of record. Try newspaper articles, general web-pages, etc. -- there is just too much missing from BibTeX. And what about this one? @techreport{bush:RAC-2001, author = {George W. Bush}, title = {Rallying the Armies of Compassion}, institution = {}, year = {2001}, month = {January}, type = {\ }, note = {Available on \url{http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/reports/faithbased.html}} } This is not a technical report by any stretch of imagination, and I have to do weird things with type and institution fields to make it at least somehow work. This should be enough for now, Matěj Cepl -- Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/blog/ GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC God is not worried about my situation. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
