[OS X TeX] Re: Bibtex and non-ASCII characters
Adam R. Maxwell
amaxwell at mac.com
Sun Nov 11 01:21:20 CET 2007
On Nov 10, 2007, at 3:35 PM, Markus S wrote:
> On 2007-11-11 00:10:41 +0100, "Adam R. Maxwell" <amaxwell at mac.com>
> said:
>> Well, "&" /is/ part of the ASCII character set. It just needs to
>> be escaped in TeX.
>
> You are right, to be precise: Non-ASCII caracters and ASCII
> characters that need to be escaped in TeX.
>>> Currently, I am sometimes replacing the & symbol with \& within
>>> Endnote, sometimes in the .bib file. Doing it always in Endnote
>>> would be safer way but browsing Endnote this looks a bit odd.
>>> My (planned) way out is to use a Perl script that converts all
>>> non- ASCII characters in the .bib file exported from Endnote so
>>> that things work in Latex. I have the Perl script, the tough job
>>> is to come up with a list of all characters that have to be
>>> replaced (and
>>> I first have to reverse all the characters I've already fixed within
>>> Endnote).
>> You could do this in BibDesk with regular expression find and replace
>> or AppleScript, which may be easier than manipulating the .bib
>> file directly. BibDesk also converts non-ASCII characters such as
>> ø or ü to the appropriate TeX sequence if you want (see the
>> Files preference
>> pane).
>
> Yes, the Umlaut and accents are taken care of in BibDesk. It also
> ignores any environments put around stuff (like {} or \ce{CO2}) and
> only displays the characters itself (ie, CO2). But it only covers
> some stuff.
It's not reasonable from a performance standpoint to parse/remove all
TeX for display.
> Take the & symbol, the degree sign, chemical formulas, the whole
> issue of protecting capital letters (eg, abbreviations) inside the
> fields.There is so much stuff that has to be hand-coded and if you
> are not very diligent about where you do it (GUI interface or .bib
> file), you are going to keep correctiong the same things over and
> over again.
If you're managing the file with EndNote and keeping it free of BibTeX-
isms, that's likely going to be painful. I manage .bib files directly
with BibDesk, so the changes are at least persistent, but converting
between formats is a difficult problem because of BibTeX/TeX syntax.
> My goal is to get the stuff from, eg, Web of Science, export it from
> Endnote into a folder with an attached folder action that takes care
> of everything.
Have fun! It sounds like you have used BibDesk, but I'll point out
that you can now search Web of Science and other ISI databases in
BibDesk. We backslash-escape & and % when importing from WoS and
SciFinder, since those are common characters in titles; RIS sources
get an even more complex conversion, since some publishers dump HTML
into their RIS.
--
adam
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