Re: [Refdb-devel] latex bibliographies with multiple databases

[Damien J. D. <D.J...@cs...>]

Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> David Nebauer writes:
>  > >   TITLE = {Why {AM} and {EURISKO} appear to work},
>  > 
>  > Alternately, you could save the title in plain Unicode with that 
>  > capitalisation and refdb's BibTeX output filter would wrap any 
>  > abnormally capitalised words in braces.  That way your reference can be 
>  > used in either DocBook XML/SGML or LaTeX output.
>  > 
> 
> If it is a matter of wrapping uppercased words in curly brackets, this
> certainly doable. Is it likely to have uppercased words in bibtex data
> which are *not* supposed to be rendered in all-caps?
> 
> regards,
> Markus
> 

Gidday

I imagine only where the style demands it (e.g. APA). Some journals have 
titles with pretty much everything (both proper and non-proper nouns and 
subitles and acronyms) capitalised. On the other hand, APA requires 
nouns that aren't proper to go lower case when citing - proper nouns and 
subitles can be uppercase.

I don't know how this is managed in Docbook styles or Endnote etc, but 
presumably titles are used verbatim because I can't imagine any logic 
funky enough to figure out whether a word is a proper noun or not 
without some extra markup.

If we're going to export all capitals to bibtex verbatim sans markup 
then I think we might as well, as a first approximation, rather than 
trying to second guess bibtex, just set the whole title as verbatim - e.g.

    TITLE = {{Why AM and EURISKO appear to work}},

Folks who use latex would probably have to turn non-proper nouns that 
are capitalised into lowercase before putting them in to RefDB and hope 
to seldom encounter a citation style that requires these things to be 
reproduced verbatim from the original article (I don't think I have yet).

The same may possibly apply to BOOKTITLE, JOURNAL, SERIES, SCHOOL, 
PUBLISHER, INSTITUTION etc.

My 2nd pennies worth.

Regards
Damien