On Mar 25, 2008, at 6:56 AM, Robin Houston wrote:
On 25/03/2008, Charilaos Skiadas cskiadas@gmail.com wrote:
The parser we use, for good or for bad, expects the files to be in the format output by BibDesk,
Is there any reason not to replace it with a proper parser? If not, I'll have a go at doing it. This problem seems to come up so often!
You are welcome to try and write such a parser, I would be quite happy to apply it. It is not something that I find worth the effort, especially compared to all the other changes I'd like to do to the LaTeX bundle and my very limited time resources. I don't think it is an easy task at all actually. I could not find a specification for the BibTeX syntax when I was looking into it. There were way too many edge cases, so I decided to rely on the more consistent output of BibDesk.
Actually the problem that shows up usually is not this one, since most MacOSX users, I believe, use BIbDesk for bib files. The problem that often occurs is that "at signs" are not allowed by the parser anywhere but at the beginning of new entries, so things like email addresses make the parser choke. That is indeed a big annoyance, and something I'd much like to see fixed. A full-blown BibTeX parser would be wonderful as well.
BibDesk has of course such a parser, perhaps you can convince them to share the details with you.
Robin
Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College