[OS X TeX] plea for help with TeX bibliographic databases: the humanities, and unicode

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Apr 12, 2005, at 19:44, Roger Hart wrote:

[...]

> BibTex with LaTeX packages, such as natbib, etc., don't seem to me  
> to have even the number of fields needed to be potentially capable  
> of formatting a bibliography for the humanities.

Some people have recommended jurabib as a more flexible option for  
humanities.  Note that you can add whatever fields you want to a  
BibTeX database, although you may have to roll your own bst to print  
them out.

> BibDesk still seems to me not to handle unicode well. I turned off  
> character conversions, set open and save to UTF-8, but I can't even  
> get it to properly import European characters in a file, or by  
> pasting an entire record. Only cutting and pasting field by field,  
> or typing into each field, seems to work. BibDesk otherwise looks  
> very promising, with excellent integration with TeXShop, so I hope  
> this will be fixed soon (assuming I'm not missing something here).

Please contact me off-list with an example .bib file that causes  
problems.  We've put a lot of work into supporting other encodings,  
so European characters should not be a problem; BibDesk + XeLaTeX has  
worked well in my testing.

> Sente seems very nice for downloading files, but the choice of  
> filters seems very odd, for example not including OCLC WorldCat,  
> the most complete database for research university libraries.
>
> So after having spent a couple more days looking in to all of this,  
> I have again concluded that the most efficient strategy for  
> formatting a humanities bibliography is to import from WorldCat  
> into EndNote, export a formatted \bibitem ... entry, paste into my  
> bibliography, and clean it up by hand.

Hopefully we can come up with something better than that!

regards,
Adam
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