Re: org-ref in action

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org> writes:

> On 2014-06-26 20:44, Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:
>>
>> I don't think this is possible without some major
>> hacking/conversion/filtering. Biblatex has many more entry types and
>> fields than bibtex. I've found that most of the older bibtex utils
>> (bibtools, bibtex2html) choke on my biblatex files.
>
> Is there a list of these new entry types? 

It depends on the style. I use the biblatex-chicago style. I grepped the
sample bib file supplied with the package to get a list of entry
types[fn:1] and fields.[fn:2] And this represents only a subset of the
possible fields! See also the variable bibtex-biblatex-entry-alist in
bibtex.el (shipped with emacs).

> Looking at the code for bibtex2html (for instance
> https://github.com/backtracking/bibtex2html/blob/master/bibtex.mli) I
> see that entry types are strings, so if there are issues, I guess they
> would happen in the generation part but not in the parsing part.

You are right. I see that one can specify a style file for parsing bib
files and biblatex does supply a biblatex.bst, e.g.,

  bibtex2html -s biblatex

However, this still produces errors (and a blank html file) when I run
it on a larger bib file that pdflatex/biber parses fine. I was able to
get it to run without errors on a small carefully culled subset (a book
and an article).

>> Even if biblatex2html did read biblatex data, its output, I believe,
>> is limited to bibtex styles, which cannot handle more complex
>> formats.

> I'm very ignorant here: from my understanding, bibtex2html does not
> care about bibtex style, it just takes bibtex data as input and
> produces html. 

> Is the problem that some entries are ignored, 

Yes, as well as many fields.

> or is there something deeper that I'm missing?

For my particular use-case, the problem is that it formats the
bibliographical data incorrectly. This is because biblatex relies on
LaTeX macros (rather than bibtex) to format the bibliography. Thus, any
utility that relies on bibtex to format bibliographies not work with
biblatex styles.

This, by the way, is why biblatex was is such a boon for those of use
working in the humanities: bibtex was *never* sufficient for humanities
citations. 

E.g., the biblatex-chicago style outputs a bibliographical item for a
book like this (with org markup added to show emphasis):

Wolloch, Isser. /The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic
Order, 1789--1820s/. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994.

bibtex2html produces this:

Isser Wolloch. /The New Regime./ W. W. Norton, 1994.

Best, 
Matt (who also would also be happy to take this off list)

Footnotes:

[fn:1] Article, Artwork, Audio, Book, Booklet, Collection, CustomC, Image,
InBook, InCollection, inproceedings, InReference, Letter, Manual,
MastersThesis, Misc, Music, MVCollection, Online, Patent, Periodical,
PhdThesis, Reference, Review, SuppBook, TechReport, Unpublished, Video

[fn:2] addendum, address, afterword, annote, author, authortype,
bookauthor, booksubtitle, booktitle, booktitleaddon, chapter, crossref,
date, doi, edition, editor, editora, editoratype, editortype,
entrysubtype, eventdate, howpublished, institution, isbn, issue,
issuetitle, journaltitle, keywords, language, lista, location,
longcrossref, mainsubtitle, maintitle, month, namea, nameaddon, nameb,
namec, note, number, options, organization, origdate, origlanguage,
origlocation, origpublisher, pages, part, publisher, pubstate, school,
series, shortauthor, shorthand, shorttitle, sortkey, sorttitle,
subtitle, title, titleaddon, translator, type, url, urldate, useauthor,
usecompiler, useeditor, usera, userc, userd, usere, userf, volume,
volumes, xref, year