Re: BibTeX issues

[Roland Winkler <winkler@gnu.org>]

On Tue, Aug 27 2019, Joost Kremers wrote:
> I know that stripping accents is more easily said than done, so
> perhaps this is not really a bug at all but intended behaviour,
> which I would understand.

Stripping accents is really not a matter specific to BibTeX.
(I vaguely remember there was a thread on this list discussing this
topic some time ago.)

If there was a generic function strip-accents, then BibTeX mode could
certainly use it within its bibtex-generate-autokey machinery.

> First, the date field does not seem to be recognised at all. In
> biblatex, the date field replaces the year field, in that it is
> considered the preferred way of providing the year of publication
> for an entry.

How about allowing the possibility that the first arg FIELD of
bibtex-autokey-get-field can also be a list of fields so that the
elements can be treated as alternatives?  Assuming that a bib(la)tex
entry has either a year or a date field, then bibtex-autokey-get-year
could use one or the other.

If you really want your own thing, you can also have a custom
bibtex-autokey-before-presentation-function that ignores its arg.

> Second, it isn't clear to me how `bibtex-generate-autokey` handles
> macros in titles, specifically \emph.

I never had such a problem.  Details probably depend on your use cases.
A generic parser for LaTeX code that can drop such things is probably
not all trivial.  (But maybe something of that kind exists alread (at
some level) for auctex or org mode or some other package?)

Also, you can always customize bibtex-autokey-titleword-change-strings.

> Last, but certainly not least, doing `bibtex-clean-entry` in an
> entry with a valid `crossref' field doesn't seem to work. Instead, I
> get the following error:
>
> bibtex-format-entry: Alternative mandatory field ‘(date year)’ is
> missing

I am not a biblatex expert.  Since BibTeX mode picked up biblatex
support in 2013, it has treated the alternative fields date and year as
mandatory, see the default of bibtex-biblatex-entry-alist.  Do you say
that these fields should be treated as crossref fields instead?

Roland