[TxMt] latex cite completion problem

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Mar 25, 2008, at 6:56 AM, Robin Houston wrote:

> On 25/03/2008, Charilaos Skiadas <cskiadas at 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