Re: [NTG-context] Bibliography, unicode strings, @ELECTRONIC, sorting and bibtex

On Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:41:56 +0200 Schmitz Thomas A. wrote:

On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:28 PM, Marco Patzer wrote:

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5) (side question) What is BibTeX used for in ConTeXt? As far as I can see, it reads the .bib database and generates a .bbl file which then is read in by ConTeXt. Why do we need an external tool for this? Why does ConTeXt not read in the .bib database and directly save it as a Lua table?

Because nobody has coded that part yet? This may not be as easy as you make it sound because quite a few heuristics go into parsing bibtex files (e.g., look at the way in which bibtex divides names into first name, last name, von-part, jr-part). Over the years, I have read and heard many complaints about bibtex and many announcements that something infinitely better is just around the corner, to be delivered in all its glory "real soon now." For the time being, I don't see any real replacement, but I may be wrong.

Do not forget that there are many databases and tools that more or less know how to deal with bibtex files. And many web sites can output bibtex data, more or less correctly. Of course, one could also consider using other "standards", such as EndNote... but we would not want to do that, would we? Alan