Re: Bibliography, unicode strings, @ELECTRONIC, sorting and bibtex

[Philipp Gesang <gesang@stud.uni-heidelberg.de>]

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Hi all,

···<date: 2012-09-18, Tuesday>···<from: Marco Patzer>···

> 2012-09-18 "Schmitz Thomas A." <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>:
> 
> > > What is BibTeX used for in ConTeXt? As far as I can see, it reads
> > > the .bib database and generates a .bbl file which then is read in by
> > > ConTeXt. Why do we need an external tool for this? Why does ConTeXt
> > > not read in the .bib database and directly save it as a Lua table?
> > 
> > Because nobody has coded that part yet? This may not be as easy as
> > you make it sound because quite a few heuristics go into parsing
> > bibtex files (e.g., look at the way in which bibtex divides names
> > into first name, last name, von-part, jr-part).
> 
> I'm aware of that. So it basically boils down to the fact that
> bibliographies are not popular among ConTeXt users (including Hans)
> and therefore much functionality is not properly implemented or
> cared for.

tl;dr: It’s not unpopular, it’s a Hard Problem™.

I guess that is so because bibliographies and citation rules are
a hard problem to solve generally. As a recent thread on this
list revealed, most of us are content to instead solve the much
easier problem of creating some bib functionality themselves,
tailored to their own needs.[0] A given cite/bib ruleset is easy
to implement (as long as you don’t put too much weight on
sorting) -- we have Lua, after all.  Developing a framework for
bibliographies, where everything needs to be adjustable and
parameterized (by non-technical people) on demand while remaining
stable over a long time, is however a totally different matter.
Just have a look at the biber/biblatex codebase and decide
yourself. (Now try to imagine the same without Perl and XML to
get the style bonus  ;-) )

Context, as opposed to LaTeX, lacks the consistent formatting
requirements by journals and editors, simply because they don’t
usually accept it as an input format.

[0] http://www.mail-archive.com/ntg-context@ntg.nl/msg62855.html

>            And BibTeX is used since it understands the semantics of
> bib files, although a pure ConTeXt/Lua solution would be possible.
> Without BibTeX this functionality would be missing since no one is
> willing to implement a parser for .bib databases.

Context happens to have such a parser, written in Lua. Probably
the best one around:

·······································································
\starttext
  \startluacode
    local db = bibtex.new()
    bibtex.load(db, "filename.bib")
    table.print(db)
  \stopluacode
\stoptext
·······································································

Regards
Philipp


> 
> If I only had time…
> 
> 
> Marco
> 
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> 
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___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
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wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
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