[tex-live] bibtex's max_print_line

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi,

Oren Patashnik a écrit :
> My current plan is pretty much as Karl suggests here, where a "known
> good place" is tentatively set to be defined as white space (but not
> including the TeX tie character ~).  One issue I still need to check,
> notes suggest, is whether Bill Gates's (evil) decision to allow spaces
> in file names means that breaking at that space in a url (if it's
> allowed in a url) will somehow mess things up.  I assume not, but as I
> say, I want to check to make sure.
> 
For the record, according to RFC 3986, a URI (hence a URL) can't contain a
literal space (ascii 32) character: such characters must be percent-encoded when
forming the URI.

Now, I'm not sure it's the question here. The problem with URLs is that they may
be very long strings (longer than max_print_line), so bibtex should be able to
ignore max_print_line when no "known good place" for line-breaking is found.

> So can someone who really knows this stuff tell me whether breaking at
> a whitespace character will ever be a real problem?  (I know it's
> possible to redefine things in TeX to make all hell break loose, but
> I'm not counting that as a real problem.)
> 
Well, if url.sty is used, it seems to me that the "argument" of the \url command
is read verbatim, and it is never ok to break inside something which is read
verbatim. On the other hand, as mentioned above, there should be no space in
(conforming) URLs, so this problem could possibly be ignored (and anyway, the
current behaviour already is incompatible with verbatim reading).


Manuel.