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

[Brian Elmegaard via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

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!