I think there is another feature BibTeX really lacks, viz. a standard style for author-title-year citations as a standard for the humanities. But I wonder whether it is really worth the effort to change something about BibTeX because I think nowadays it is supposed to be stable in the first place. E.g., BibTeX has been implemented in many a library catalogue as an exchange format for bibliographic data. And those who rely on citation styles different from the standard styles and on UTF-8 have a much more powerful tool at hand: Biblatex. Maybe it would be best not to change anything about BibTeX now and to concentrate on Biblatex and Biber instead. Regards, Jürgen. Am 05.05.18 um 00:36 Uhr schrieb Karl Berry: > Hello LaTeX folk. Oren (Patashnik) has expressed a desire to do > "whatever seems useful" (given that compatibility is paramount) with a > future BibTeX release -- not that anything is going to happen quickly, > but he wanted to start gathering information at this point. > > For instance, clearly it would be nice to have a url field in the base > styles. But, what to do in the .bbl file? Assume \url{...} works? But > there have been different versions over the years and they don't all > accept the same thing, e.g., bare "#" and "%" in the url, not to mention > \url{...} vs. \url|...|, etc. And it induces a new dependency (to load > url/hyperrref/something) on the document, though maybe that is not a big > deal. Or maybe use a new macro, \btxurl, whose definition is output by > bibtex itself? That doesn't sound right. > > A doi field is another glaring candidate. But there there isn't even a > commonly-available \doi command in the first place. So what to do? \btxdoi? > > Maybe BibTeX could provide a core file bibtex.sty which is (implicitly?, > if available) loaded to define all such macros, probably mostly by > loading other packages? Sounds fraught with possible problems, but I > guess it's the most general solution. > > Another idea is to add new entry types. That at least doesn't have the > same compatibility issues as fields, but maybe isn't that interesting, either. > > Another "modern" idea is to support Unicode sorting, but having core > bibtex depend on ICU does not sound good, nor does reimplementing the > sorting algorithm. (And there is bibtexu for people who are gluttons for > such punishment.) People can already put UTF-8 characters in their .bib > files if they want to, I believe, and they just get output literally. > > Overall, it somewhat seems to us that although bibtex has zillions of > limitations and deficiencies, they have already been worked around, one > way or another (e.g., using biblatex). So imposing fixes in the core > code may be a solution that's worse than a problem, meaning the best > thing to do is ... nothing. Which doesn't sound right either :). > > Reactions, ideas? --thanks, karl. >