Re: Bibliography in MKIV, custom rendering

[Rik Kabel <context@rik.users.panix.com>]

On 2017-08-12 04:54, Hans Hagen wrote:
> On 8/11/2017 8:58 PM, Rik Kabel wrote:
>> On 2017-08-11 10:01, Alan Braslau wrote:
>>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>> 2) Apple Inc. is not a name so you should not be using author:
>>> organization is more appropriate.
>>>
>> I do not think that this should be the case.
>>
>> APA and Chicago/Turbanian (and doubtless others) accept association 
>> names as author names, and provide rules for handling them.
>
> and as a consequence i bet this is why journals get typeset partly by 
> hand (tweak and cheat on these things) ... and why each publisher then 
> has its own style (with cheats and tricks)
>
>> The lack of either an author or an editor is currently flagged in 
>> ConTeXt as an error for books and perhaps other bibtex entry types as 
>> well. Or do you mean to apply this recommendation to only the 
>> electronic type or some other limited subset of types?
>>
>> Perhaps it is better to use the association name as an author and 
>> protect it with a layer of curlies or quotation marks, as {{Apple, 
>> Inc.}}, "{Apple, Inc.}", or '{Apple, Inc.}', any one of which will do 
>
> one can do that of course (an dit will work) but then someone will 
> come along and say that ...
>
> our recomendation is that one spends some time on a proper database as 
> it pays off
>
>> the job and also serve to prevent what would surely be unwanted 
>> abbreviation for styles that abbreviate what are parsed as given names.
> we really try to get away from fuzzyness ... in fact, the bib format 
> or at least the way it's often used is a structural coding nightmare 
> (and often tex commands are then used to bypass things) .. i think 
> that it never went through a proper 'design, test, review, revise' cycle
>
> reverse engineering what is there + side effects took us quite a while 
> and esp the author bit is a pain (this parsing) ... there have been 
> proposals for alternatives in the past decades (take mlbibtex) but so 
> far we're stuck with historic stuff: making a database in a format 
> that is not that suitable (no nesting) using practices that are 
> counter intuitive and demand lots of obscure magic
>
> (one day Alan will wrap this up in an article)
>
> Hans

Alan has stated elsewhere that his intent is to provide first an 
APA-compliant subsystem, and to add after that support for other 
regimes. He has also expressed an understandable reluctance to add 
non-standard fields to bibtex. But it is clearly impossible to provide 
an APA-compliant system under such a constraint—for example, for some 
works APA requires an original publication date and bibtex does not 
support that. It is similarly difficult to see how one can comply with 
other requirements of APA, such as square brackets around estimated 
dates for archival sources (how do you identify an estimated date?), 
constructing shortened titles that are then alphabetized by the first 
non-significant word, spelling out author names where two or more 
authors share the same abbreviated names, and so on. Biblatex attempts 
to address some of these issues with an explosion of new fields, and 
still, I think, does not succeed. CSL may do a better job on some of 
these, but again, I do not think that the type of organic standards set 
forth by APA and others are fully amenable to any automated parsing. 
This is why I suggested to Alan (off-line) that we need a mechanism to 
override the generated citation and bibliography/reference list entries 
with customized versions (\citeas, or additional fields for \cite).

Clearly bibtex is not compatible with the requirements of current 
documentation standards. Those who require compliant citation to 
whatever standard with which they are burdened need a better database, 
support for conversion from bibtex, and a mechanism to override whatever 
automated result is produced. Of these, the last is most crucial.

As to the specific issue of association names as author names: Why is 
widening the definition of the author name field using an 
already-supported protection mechanism worse than overloading the use of 
the organization field, which is intended denote an affiliation and is 
not currently supported in the major entry categories?

-- 
Rik

___________________________________________________________________________________
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://context.aanhet.net
archive  : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________