bug#47455: 27.1; bibtex mode - citation key generation - non-ascii characters

[Brian Elmegaard]

Hi

Thanks for looking into this.
I understand your reasoning about this being an issue with the tools used.
In auctex I can also enter \newcommand{\ü}{u} without being warned that it will 
not work with latex.

The warning seems to be a good idea to me as well.

Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Roland Winkler <winkler@gnu.org> 
Sent: 26. maj 2021 20:57
To: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
Cc: 47455@debbugs.gnu.org; Brian Elmegaard <be@mek.dtu.dk>
Subject: Re: bug#47455: 27.1; bibtex mode - citation key generation - non-ascii 
characters

On Tue May 25 2021 Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> And this gets even more difficult to deal with for non-Latin scripts.
> 
> So I'm not sure anything here can be done programmatically...  the 
> command could output a warning?  "Probably invalid key"?

The warning is a good idea.  Actually, the warning should be issued if there 
are non-ascii characters anywhere in a BibTeX key because
(oldfashioned) BibTeX will choke on those no matter where they appear.  So I'll 
add a new element for the user variable bibtex-entry-format for this.  Then 
users can enable these warnings if they use oldfashioned BibTeX.  (Those who 
use modern variants of BibTeX need not enable these warnings.)

I believe that the real problem here lies in the fact that many publishers of 
scientific journals let you download citation records for their journal 
articles.  When they offer not only BibTeX-formatted records but other formats, 
too, the BibTeX records are often malformed, decorated with non-ascii 
characters that BibTeX (and
LaTeX) cannot handle and other things.  I have been fooled a number of times by 
"invisible" non-ascii characters.  So I will enable the new option for myself!