Re: [Refdb-users] refdb and bibtex

[Markus H. <hoe...@co...>]

Dylan Oliver writes:
 > Almost, because of a minor but annoying mishandling of the ampersand (\&) 
 > character. While getref shows that it was preserved through the conversion of 
 > my original .bib to .ris (with bib2ris) and importation with refdbc's addref, 
 > refdbib outputs it as \& , which bibtex doesn't like. 
 > 
 > Now that I think of it, the \& really shouldn't be preserved by bib2ris, as it 
 > wouldn't make sense to any of the other formats. Shouldn't it be translated 
 > by bib2ris into something (what?) the rest of the bibliography formats can 
 > deal with, and then translated back to \& by refdbib when using the bibtex 
 > output type? Would this be a difficult fix? I've got a wee bit of experience 
 > with C, and would be willing to look at it after I'm done with all of my work 
 > for the semester..

Did you run the bib2ris output through the supplied perl script
tex2mail? I'm not sure about \& but in general this script should take
care of these TeX constructs (in terms of removing them without a trace).

If you plan to use your references for other purposes than LaTeX, then
indeed the references should not contain any LaTeX-specific
commands. Unfortunately RefDB is not yet capable to export
LaTeX/BibTeX correctly, so only simple cases will work. I'm afraid it
shows here that the BibTeX support was added "real quick" and that
many issues have simply not been addressed yet.

I'm still pondering the proper way of handling LaTeX formatting
commands in the database. As it is next to impossible to re-create the
original markup after stripping it, I favour the possibility to keep
the markup in the database, but strip it for any output other than
BibTeX. This might have funny results on queries though, so it
would be a less than perfect solution. Your input, be it in form of
code or of mere suggestions, is always welcome.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka <hoe...@co...>
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/