Re: bibmodule requests

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi Stefano,

I have to be brief, I do not have enough time on my hands right now to
deal extensively with bibmodule issues. It is on my todo list for the
near future though.

Stefano wrote:
> I have been using the bibmodule for a couple of weeks now, and it works
> great!  ... but, I have run into some situations that are not considered.

Thank you!

> (1) It would be nice to visually distinguish the cited author using a
> different font or style in the text.  I was able to add \c!authorstyle to
> \setupcite and make changes to the appropriate areas in the t-bib.tex
> module.  I suppose I could also add a \c!yearstyle as well to allow for old
> style figures.  In my case, I set \c!authorstyle={\em}

Could you email me (personally!) your changes please? I want to such
extensions into the main module whenever possible.

> (2) Another situation arises when dealing with multiple references from the
> same author in the same year.  The years have a lower case letter added,
> such as 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, etc.

> Is there any consideration to having .aux file created by texexec based on
> the entries cited in the document?  I ended up creating a batch file to do
> this so it's not really an issue for me.  Is there a better way to do this?

Bibtex is a very LaTeX-specific bit of software, and the less
I have to deal with it, the better I feel.  I will never write code
to create an .aux file that lists the actual references, because
I am already a bit annoyed by the mere fact that this .aux LaTeX
thing is hardwired in bibtex. I don't want to spend any time on
improving it.

Conceptually, the .bib format does not really exist where the module
is involved. I consider the .bbl file to be the actual source
database (this is why there is a \usepublications command).
If someone doesn't want the 1995a item in the bbl, just delete it
for the bbl file and never run bibtex again. (a future version
of the bib module will support MlBibTeX's XML format, when that
becomes available).

> (3) Another issue I found is when using the
> \cite[year][label1,label2,label3,etc.] and I have years such as 1995a,
> 1995b, 1995c, etc. only one of those years is listed, while if I use
> \cite[author] or \cite[authoryear] or \cite[authoryears], all the required
> years are listed.  Unfortunately, the grouped years are not in order i.e.
> 1995b before 1995a, but it looks like this depends on the ordering of the
> labels.

I have to look deeper into this before I can give real answers. It
certainly sounds like there is a bug or omission in the module.

> (4) Another issue is with regards to the author names in the publication
> list.  The first author is typically inverted (last name before first name),
 > ....

This was also requested by David Wooten. `Clean' support for this will
be added in the future, but if  you need it right now, you need a
definition along these lines:

   %D The \type{\scratchcounter} is incremented by \specialbibinsert
   %D before each author/editor is typeset, so the only thing that needs
   %D doing is testing its value to decide which of the two `standard'
   %D author formatting macros to call.
   %D
   %D You may have to fix the \type{\normalauthor} definition as well,
   %D because the 'glue items' like \type{firstnamesep} may get in the
   %D way.

   \def\toggledauthor#1#2#3#4#5%
    {\relax \ifnum \scratchcounter > 1
       \normalauthor{#1}{#2}{#3}{#4}{#5}%
     \else
       \invertedauthor{#1}{#2}{#3}{#4}{#5}%
     \fi  }

   \setuppublicationlist
     [artauthor=\toggledauthor,
      editor=\toggledauthor,
      author=\toggledauthor]


> (5) Is it possible to have additional annotations with a citation? 
 > ..
> \def\Cite[#1][#2][#3]{(#1 \cite[#2], #3)}
> \Cite[e.g.][smith1995][p. 27]

That is the proposed solution (at least for the time being).

Greetings, Taco