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Re: [Bibulus-dev] LaTeX-Bibulus interface, a prposal
From: |
Thomas M. Widmann |
Subject: |
Re: [Bibulus-dev] LaTeX-Bibulus interface, a prposal |
Date: |
03 Jul 2003 20:04:43 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 |
address@hidden (Palle Jørgensen) writes:
> I am trying to find out how the user interface should with the bibulus
> LaTeX package.
>
> An idea would be to make it a keyval interface:
>
> \cite[language = <language>,
> type = <citation type>,
> bibliography = <bibliography in the document>,
> ]{key(s)}
Looks good in general.
> 'language' is the language of tyhe citation. By default this is set to
> be the language at the current point in the text, set with
> the \selectlanguage command.
Why would one ever want a language other than the current one?
But it'll be nice for debugging purposes at least.
> 'bibliography' if one wants to use several bibliographies in the same
> document.
Good. Very useful.
> 'type' could be text, number, author-number, author-year etc.
> [...]
> 'Old' commands of the natbib package and others, is to be iomplementet
> as citet -> \cite[type=text].
Aren't you confusing two things here?
1) Citation mode (numerical, author-year, author-number, in footnotes,
in text, ...);
2) Citation type (in parentheses, within text cited as person, within
text cited as title, ...).
I don't think it makes much sense to change the former locally,
whereas the latter should be specified each time.
> The questions are:
>
> o Is this the best interface?
At least it's easy to understand, and I cannot think of anything
better.
> o Wich keys are needed?
>
> I have som suggestions (besides those mentioned above):
>
> - 'optional' for optional text
We probably want more than one field for this. For instance, Natbib
allows the following:
\citep[see][chap. 2]{key} ==>> (see Jones et al., 1990, chap. 2)
BTW, Natbib also allows access to individual parts of an entry:
\citeauthor{key} ==>> Jones et al.
\citeauthor*{key} ==>> Jones, Baker, and Williams
\citeyear{key} ==>> 1990
\citeyearpar{key} ==>> (1990)
I think we could generalise this a bit to allow access to any part of
the entry (e.g., title, short title, pages, ...).
> - 'label' for internal LaTeX references
What do you mean by this?
> Of course it must be possible to set these parameters globally as
> defaults. (Mostly the type key and the bibliography, the 'label'
> would be silly to set globally...) With these defaults the interface
> is the old \cite command.
I must admit I think it's dangerous to have only one general command.
I think it was wise that Natbib split \cite up into \citet and \citep
to make authors conscious about the difference.
/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/>