Re: Replacing BibTeX (was: biblatex-apa - work underway)

On Nov 17, 8:32 pm, Bruce <bdarcus.li...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But the current evidence suggests that the general approach of CSL is
working pretty well.

I suppose it depends what you mean. It works pretty well in covering
many bibliography styles, and data certainly. But as I say, this data
needs to go onto paper or a screen at some point and you can't expect
it to be generally good at doing this for Word, RTF, LaTeX, HTML etc.
without invoking *as part of the bib processing* any of their
respective functionalities. It's like expecting a general purpose
cleaning product to be as good on say, silver, as one specifically
made for silver. It can be good enough and if you are aiming for cost-
savings and coverage, then it may well be a better choice. I'm really
only trying to keep clear what the compromises are.

I don't accept that citation and bibliographic style
configuration MUST be dependent on the low-level details of a
typesetting language.

I think this is an empirical matter really - try to make a general
system and I guarantee that this is what you'll find more and more as
you extend it. You can eliminate the "must" if you stay fairly
generic. That's why we end up with specialised languages and
formalisms all over the place - because a general solution is never
adequate for details (even though it can be good and be perfectly fine
for most cases).

<option name="ibid-scope" value="page"/>

There's no magic that means that will work in any particular
implementation without code, of course, but there's still room for
that sort of evolution at the style level.

This is just syntax though - I can't see how a style could do anything
with this since unless you are "inside" a typesetting system run in
LaTeX, for example - what does "page" mean? This is the issue -
outside of the specific system which writes the dots, "page" doesn't
really mean anything - what size of page, what font size, what inter-
line spacing, what justification etc.? I don't think we're actually
disagreeing much here - I think that you can quite easily specify
things as you say and pass such date to the typesetting algorithms to
do the work but then we have a clear demarcation between the data
model and the typesetting. Which means "replacing biblatex" is a
misnomer - we are only talking about replacing the data model.

I'm not understanding. Do you mean if I have ...

"According to Doe (1999), x, y, z. But a is also true (Doe, 1999)."

... that the output result should be ...

"According to Doe (1999), x, y, z. But a is also true (Doe)."

Exactly, but automated so that the cite command for both is the same,
with underlying code detecting whether you are still in the same
paragraph for the second cite. The only way I think you can do this in
something like CSL is to set some attribute on citation extraction
which means having some sort of detection of when you are in a
different paragraph in the document source. This is unreliable because
the source isn't (in TeX) necessarily a good guide to the printed
output (\marginpar, for example). It also means more and more specific
code to help CSL deal with TeX. This is fine but then you are making a
non-generic systems and we already have a good one of those -
biblatex.

I'm not sure what to make of all the value-laden language of
"sophisticated" vs. "simple" and "excellent" vs. "average." If you're
happy spending all your time writing LaTeX-specific styles, and you
don't have publishers or editors refusing to accept those documents,
then sure. That's not the world I live in though.

Right, and that's the split in this debate - it started about LaTeX
only and ended up as a general bib system debate which means there is
a lot of cross-purpose discussion. If I needed a system to move around
between document prep systems, I wouldn't use .bib files either (but
I'd convert to them so I could use biblatex because I think it's never
going to be matched by a general purpose system for LaTeX documents).

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Replacing BibTeX (was: biblatex-apa - work underway)
    ... things as you say and pass such date to the typesetting algorithms to ... implementation of biblatex *for LaTeX* would know what a page is *in ... It's the same when a CSL demands something to be printed in ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: Replacing BibTeX (was: biblatex-apa - work underway)
    ... things as you say and pass such date to the typesetting algorithms to ... implementation of biblatex *for LaTeX* would know what a page is *in ... It's the same when a CSL demands something to be printed in ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: Replacing BibTeX (was: biblatex-apa - work underway)
    ... manage the biblatex database and a mechanism to allow biblatex to query ... the database in the Zotero-like app's native format (so the end-user ... completely wedded to the typesetting system ... based citations, requires some consideration of the document. ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: Replacing BibTeX (was: biblatex-apa - work underway)
    ... manage the biblatex database and a mechanism to allow biblatex to query ... the database in the Zotero-like app's native format (so the end-user ... sophisticated citations and references. ... completely wedded to the typesetting system ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: What Software to Type Math In?
    ... : their new religion. ... The problem is that Latex, and the others, are typeSETTIMG ... This goes completely against the typesetting mentality. ... Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University ...
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