[Bibulus-dev] Grievings

[Thomas M. Widmann]

Hi,

for some time I've been collecting people's grievings about BibTeX.
What follows is a list (in random order) of some of these that aren't
solved by Bibulus yet, but which would need to be addressed at some
stage.  Each starts with a description, normally a cut&paste from a
newsgroup or similar, followed by a note.

Comments and further problems are most welcome!


*** 1 ***

Description:

I have a bibliography of historical documents, some of which are
modern translations or reprints of the originals, and where I need to
indicate both the original author and the modern editor/translator
[...]

Notes:

BibTeX doesn't allow both editor and author for books.  Would this be
best handled by a <reprint> entry type, or just as a normal <book>?


*** 2 ***

Description:

I need to format a *very* long bibliography so that the first line of
each citation is a list of author names; the second line begins with
an indentation and the publication date; then, after another
indentation, there's the remainder of the citation indented as a block
as in many of LaTeX's lists. (This is a style used by the National
Academy Press, if that rings any bells.) I use natbib and custom-bib,
but as I understand things, this kind of formatting goes beyond their
capabilities.

Notes:

Just another way of outputting the bibliography.


*** 3 ***

Description:

I would like to merge two references into the same numbering as
for instance to get something like

[11] A. Author, J. Chem. Phys. 98, 2340 (1999); B. Ball, Phys. Rev. E 
56, 3340 (1989);....

so more references are merged onto the same item. How can I do this
if the references are in a BibTeX file? If I do \cite{a_author,b_ball}
I will get two separate items [11] A. Author ... and [12] B. Ball ....

Notes:

It is solved by mcite for BibTeX, it seems.  The package overloads the
\cite command, so that citations of the form \cite{paper1,paper2}
appear in the document as a single citation, and appear arranged
appropriately in the bibliography itself.

Bibulus::LaTeX's \cite command should be able to handle this.


*** 4 ***

Description:

I've got the following thing to do. I want a bibliography with
bibitems grouped by authors. It should look as a dvi file something
like this:

Bibliography

author-name, first-name
     [year] article 1, ....
     [year] book 1, ....

author-name, first-name
     [year] article 1, ....

author-name, first-name
     [year] book1, ....
     [year] book2, ....

Notes:

Just another way of formatting.


*** 5 ***

Description:

In some languages, e.g., Georgian, it is common to abbreviate given
names not to their initial letter but to a short form.  For example:
   Ak'ak'i -> Ak'.
   Arnold -> Arn.
   ??? -> Iv.
   ??? -> Al.

Notes:

This should be easy enough with a Perl hash if the abbreviations are
well-defined.  Otherwise it may be better to define them in the
bibliography files.


*** 6 ***

Description:

Has anyone dealt with the new citation format that American
Geophysical Union journals are requesting us to use because of the new
electronic format, ie

Citation: Ohtani, S., K. Takahashi, and A. T. Y. Lui, Electron
dynamics in the current disruption system, J. Geophys. Res., 107(A10),
1322, doi:10.1029/2001JA009236, 2002.

How are people implementing the new doi number.  Especially since most
articles will now have mixed citations, citing articles with and
without doi numbers.  Is there an update to AGU++ that handles this? 
I have not yet seen this in other electronic journals, but if I
understand correctly other electronic journals are using a similar
format, and were doing so before AGU adopted it, so maybe someone has
the solution.

Notes:

The real problem is whether to extend the DTD with all kinds of extra
fields -- one could also imagine requests for various library
cataloguing schemes.


*** 7 ***

Description:

Putting bibliography entries in text

This is a common requirement for journals and other publications in
the humanities. Sometimes the requirement is for the entry to appear
in the running text of the document, while other styles require that
the entry appear in a footnote.

Options for entries in running text are

* The package bibentry, which puts slight restrictions on the format
  of entry that your .bst file generates, but is otherwise undemanding
  of the bibliography style.

* The package inlinebib, which requires that you use its
  inlinebib.bst

* The package jurabib, which was originally targeted at German law
  documents, and has comprehensive facilities for the manipulation of
  citations. The package comes with four bibliography styles that you
  may use: jurabib.bst, jhuman.bst and two Chicago-like ones.

Options for entries in footnotes are

* The package footbib, and

* The package jurabib, again.

Notes:

This just needs to be implemented somehow.


*** 8 ***

Description:

I am creating separate latex documents for each section of a proposal.
I would like to use \cite to reference citations in the text, but I do
no want to print a source list at the end of every latex document,
each of which just represents a subsection of the complete proposal.

Notes:

Easy to do, but should bibulustex be able to handle this, or would it
be OK to require that people write their own Perl program in cases
like this?


*** 9 ***

Description:

Actually, I think what I need is a LaTeX macro Tool/Package (named as
NOTECITE as an assumption), which can do the follows:

1) Collect information of \cite{} for later use of BIBTEX (not needed
         because this will be done by LATEX itself);
2) Collect information of \footnote{} (or some other command defined
         by NOTECITE) and put them into a auxiliary file(for example,
         file with extension .NOTECITE), just as what ENDNOTE have
         done;
3) Read information from .BBL (produced by BITE) and .NOTECITE, sort
         the items (according to the order they appears in the text),
         and put them into the BIBLIOGRAPHY list.

That is to say, emerging .BBL and .NOTECITE is done by NOTECITE, not
by BIBTEX.

The story come as the follows: sometimes it's necessary to add some NOTE
(such as "and References therein") into a BIBLIOGRAPHY item. In some other
cases FOOTNOTE in the main text is required to appear in the BIBLIOGRAPHY
list, rather than appear on the current page (by some Journals :-(

Notes:

The problem seems to be how footnotes and citations interact.
A thorough analysis is needed.


*** 10 ***

Description:

Can anyone tell me how to get Natbib to cite 'In Press' references 
properly?  For example, an in-text citation such as \citep{kauf01} for 
this .bib entry:

@book{kauf01,
   Year = {In Press},
   Title = {Everyday Strings of English and the Rhetorical Priming of 
Audience},
   Publisher = {Lawrence Erlbaum Associates},
   Address = {Mahwah, New Jersey},
   Author = {Kaufer, David S. and Ishizaki, Suguru and Butler, Brian S. 
and Collins, Jeff}}

results in the output (Kaufer et al., ress).  
I want the output to be (Kaufer et al., In Press).  

Notes:

The problem for Bibulus is how to specify "In Press" (and/or
"Forthcoming"), since this has to come out in the right language.


*** 11 ***

Description:

It would be nice to be able to create aliases for bibliography labels,
e.g. (in LaTeX):

\bibalias{DragonBook}{AhoSethiUllman1986}
I can now cite~\cite{DragonBook}.

Note:

Should be easy.


*** 12 ***

Description:

Something I'd like to see support for in BibTeX styles is long and
short forms of conference and edited volume titles etc.  So depending
on thoroughness vs. space efficiency, I could easily choose via styles
whether to have a conference title come out as "EACL 7" or
"Proceedings of the Seventh Meeting of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics".

Notes:

This should probably not be defined within each entry, since the
abbreviations would more often than not tend not to come out in the
same way.  How and where should this be done?


/Thomas
-- 
Thomas Widmann          Bye-bye to BibTeX: join the Bibulus project now!
address@hidden              <http://www.nongnu.org/bibulus/>
Glasgow, Scotland, EU     <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/bibulus/>