[OS X TeX] bibtex and Japanese (or Chinese)

[Simon Spiegel]

On 13.11.2007, at 17:30, Álex Bueno wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering anyone knows if there's a way to easily incorporate  
> Japanese text along with its romanization in bibtex. The idea is to  
> produce something like this, ideally with the option to not print  
> the Japanese:
>
> Natsume Sōseki [夏目漱石], Wagahai wa neko de aru (I am a cat)  
> [吾輩は猫である], Tōkyō: Ōkura Shoten, 1905.
>
> While not especially common in publishing, it seems useful to  
> include kanji in a bibliography, if only for personal archival  
> purposes. The problem here is with the author names, naturally, not  
> with the titles. Also, dealing with name and surname order properly  
> would be good.
>
> I am using jurabib at the moment because it seems it's the closest  
> thing out there to the Chicago footnote citation/bibliography  
> system that we use in the humanities.

Personally, I don't have any experience with bibtex and Japanese but  
the general question of bibtex and Unicode has recently been  
discussed on comp.text.tex and the general consensus was that there  
currently simply is no bibtex replacement which handles Unicode  
properly (whether there is a special CJK bibtex replacement, I don't  
know). At the moment, the results of bibtex in combination Unicode  
files are quite unpredictable and there's no other tool to do the  
job. Mlbibtex is a project which has been in development for quite  
some time, but there's no place to download it although it has been  
presented at various occasions. There's also CrossTeX (http:// 
www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/crosstex/ ) which is meant as a modern  
bibtex replacement but I have no idea whether it handles Unicode  
better (the website doesn't say anything about this).

To be honest, I find this situation quite strange and a bit  
embarrassing. With XeTeX (and the forthcoming LuaTeX) and OpenType  
(La)TeX is moving fast towards Unicode but bibtex hasn't evolved a  
bit. Of course, it's always easy to say for a non-programmer like me,  
but coming up with a bibtex replacement which handles Unicode really  
doesn't seem like something complicated to me and I'm surprised that  
there aren't more people who see the need for such a tool.

simon
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Simon Spiegel
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