Software: beastie

[Karl Berry]

    I'll take a look, and see if I'm being overoptimistic there.  Watch
    this space.

Thanks Norman :).

    I didn't aim to be 100% compatible with bibtex-the-program

The main issue that comes to mind for me is sorting compatibility. For
accented last names and other such, BibTeX effectively requires
something like:
  author = "{\noopsort{SortKey}{LastName}}, First" 

Does that still work in beastie?

I make extensive use of this in TUGboat, because there's no better
method (as far as I know) of getting the sort order I want. Unicode
collation is of course impossible in original bibtex, and overrides
would still surely be necessary even if it was used.

(btxdoc mentions \noopsort in the context of year fields, but using it
to fix name sorting is, for me, far far more common. Well, I actually use
\gobble since there's no point in a separate control sequence.)

Best,
Karl