m-bib: something more

[e_w_g@t-online.de (Eckhart Guthöhrlein)]

Some different issues (not concerning \cite syntax):

1) I noticed a blank line following all entries in the list of publications 
which terminate with an entirely full line. Perhaps some empty boxes and 
spaces sneaking into the output?

2) A sort problem: I have two articles, same author, same year. 
Accordingly, the order is determined by the title. The problem: the one 
appearing first in the bib file gets the key y=1953a, the second y=1953b, 
resulting in Xyz (1953b) appearing before Xyz (1953a) in the list of 
publications if the alphabetically preceding title occurs second in the bib 
file.
Probably not worth fixing in the bst file, since changing the order in the 
bib file is easy for these rare cases. But a small note in the 
documentation would be nice.

3) The capabilities concerning different languages could be enhanced. There 
are many hard-coded english words in bibl-apa.tex as well as in 
cont-xx.bst, like 'and', 'pages' and 'chapter'. This should be 
configurable, by default adapting to the language used (either the current 
one or the main language, at the user's option).
Since we are talking about languages: My current work is in 
\mainlanguage[de], whereas most (but not all) references are in english. So 
I do the following:

- switch to \en just before \completepublications. Btw: why doesn't this 
affect the head text? I still get 'Literatur' (that's quite nice, since I 
want to...)

- switch to the respective languages (for languages different from en) in 
the bib file itself, e.g.
title={{\de Sehr langweilig}}

- edit cont-au.bst and bibl-apa.tex, replacing the english words by
\TranslateToMainLanguage[de=Kapitel,en=chapter]

A little macro I have defined via
\def\TranslateToMainLanguage[#1]{%
    {\language[\currentmainlanguage]%
     \translate[#1]}}

This is because I think that even if the titles etc. are in english, words 
not belonging to the entry itself have to be typeset in the default 
language for the document. One could be of a different opinion, of course.

This is rather cumbersome. Are there users around this list who have to 
cope with multilingual bibliographies? I would be interested in how they do 
it. Maybe it doesn't need to be that complicated.

Perhaps there could be a key defining the language of an entry (and the 
language of 'pages', 'chapter' etc., but only if one wants this).

That's all for now!

Eckhart