Hi, Pierre-Jean! At 2021-08-09T13:42:39+0200, pierrejean.fic...@posteo.net wrote: > To add to the discussion concerning refer, here is an excerpt of my > past work and choices on that subject. > > There's an ISO standart which defines the needed and optional fields > of a bibliography list, as well as their order: ISO-690. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_690 > > It's unfortunately not much used, and even worst, not freely > available... But the idea to define fields and their order and let the > choice of typography and punctuation to the user is valuable.
Agreed on all points. I find proprietary standards to be dubious
things.
> For my thesis, I had to hack refer to make it sort the bibliography
> list according to the order of fields defined by that standart.
Yes, this is certainly something for which a communication channel is
needed to the preprocessor, to suit the many different citation styles
that control this aspect of formatting as well.
> I needed the following fields, that I implemented in u-ref.tmac, for
> utmac:
>
> %H information about the publication (first edition, french edition,
> etc.)
This would serve the need I raised (for an edition number) just fine.
> %h heading of the section in which the citation appears.
>
> %M the collection in which the book in published.
Doesn't %B already do this?
%B For an article that is part of a book, the title of the
book.
> %P total number of pages of the book.
This collides with an existing usage.
%P Page number. A range of pages can be specified as m-n.
> %p page of the citation.
Any chance you might consider swapping %p and %P in utmac? Also,
because I'm curious, is there really a citation format that demands the
total number of pages in the book? :-O (Checking your Wikipedia
URL...it's apparently the ISO 690 practice for citing an entire work.
Good grief.)
> %U co-author, translator, etc.
For GNU refer(1) I think we'd want to tighten the semantics of this to
just the translator; %A already supports multiple authors.
%A The name of an author. If the name contains a title such
as Jr. at the end, it should be separated from the last
name by a comma. There can be multiple occurrences of the
%A field. The order is significant. It is a good idea
always to supply an %A field or a %Q field.
> %w which kind of electronic document (CDROM, online, etc.)
>
> %x url of an electronic document.
>
> %y update date of an electronic document.
>
> %z last access to an electronic document.
I think most of your extensions seem sound, with the exceptions of %B
and %P, and with a tweak to %U.
> I also implemented:
>
> - two formats: one for notes, and another for the bibliography list,
I think there's already infrastructure for this but it might not be
sufficiently developed in groff's macro packages.
> - a contextual substitution of the references by "ibid." or "op. cit.
> p. xx."
No loc. cit.? ;-)
For reference, here's how the field letters were "standardized" in the
old days[1].
%A Author's name
%B Book containing article referenced
%C City (place of publication)
%D Date of publication
%E Editor of book containing article referenced
%F Footnote number or label (supplied by \fIrefer\fP\|)
%G Government order number
%H Header commentary, printed before reference
%I Issuer (publisher)
%J Journal containing article
%K Keywords to use in locating reference
%L Label field used by \fB\-k\fP option of \fIrefer\fP
%M Bell Labs Memorandum (undefined)
%N Number within volume
%O Other commentary, printed at end of reference
%P Page number(s)
%Q Corporate or Foreign Author (unreversed)
%R Report, paper, or thesis (unpublished)
%S Series title
%T Title of article or book
%V Volume number
%X Abstract \(em used by \fIroffbib\fP, not by \fIrefer\fP
%Y,Z ignored by \fIrefer\fP
At a glance, these semantics were unchanged from 4.2BSD (1983) through
to 4.4BSD (1994).
We can see here how %F, %M, and %X got freed up. (GNU refer(1) now
calls "%X" the "annotation".)
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.2BSD/usr/man/man1/addbib.1
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