Bug#382075: bibtex fails to handle unicode .bib files
On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 12:37 +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > Package: tetex-bin
> > Version: 3.0-17
> > Severity: normal
> > File: /usr/bin/bibtex
> >
> > bibtex cannot deal with Unicode .bib files. It would be nice if this
> > were possible, unicode is kind of a standard by now...
>
> bibtex in tetex is not even 8bit-clean. There's an 8bit-clean bibtex
> implementation in texlive, but even there it is not the default.
> Probably by a reason.
>
> I know of one attempt to reimplement bibtex for Unicode support, and
> additionally with the possibility to switch scripts and languages on a
> per-entry basis, mlbibtex.
There is also Bibulus: <URL:http://www.nongnu.org/bibulus/>
Having perl instead of the stack based language of BibTeX would be nice.
Unfortunately development has stopped some time ago.
> But this seems to be a rather academic
> project - I heard a talk where its author nicely explained its great
> planned features and showed some commandline examples on-screen, but
> when someone asked the question "How well is it usable as a replacement
> for bibtex, and can one download a version for testing?" he didn't even
> understand the question, let alone answer it... So I wouldn't expect it
> to be a usable alternative in the foreseeable future.
AFAIK talks about mlbibtex can be heared at almost every TeX conference.
Some people see it as some sort of running gag ...
cheerio
ralf
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