Some afterthoughts

Dear Jens,

I thought a bit about our conversation of yesterday. In addition, I posted a 
patch with updated Dutch support for Jurabib. Yes, it's in the new patch 
service at SF! Let me know whether you find this way of posting patches 
convenient.

But back to the afterthoughts. I had a look at jurabib.mbs and guess that I 
understand where you want to go, but I'm not sure this is the right track:

1. Proposing the standard versions creates redundancy. If one does it the mbs 
way, one should present the user with three options like this:

a. Do you want to format after economics style?
b. Do you .. .. German jura style?
c. Do you .. .. English Oxford humanites style?

Then afterwards, the user comes in a series of questions tweaked to the 
specific style they have opted for, confronted with the default settings, but 
choices offered to them where needed.

2. But I'm not that enthousiastic about the mbs idea, after all. I mean, I've 
used it a long time ago. The difficulty with such scripts is that they are 
very picky on making errors. Once you make one mistake, you have to start all 
over again. And because you get so many questions, you make these mistakes 
very easily.

3. So finally, I came to the conclusion that the best I can think of is a gui 
as a frontend to creating the style files. In that GUI, each field and 
separator should be an object that the user can set in the right order for 
each entry type. The four existing style files should then be four sane 
default settings that users may tweak according to their needs.

4. I know this is beyond TeX programming but it might well be the best way to 
solve this problem, as it makes life easiest for users. Doing it this way 
would dramatically decrease the need for LaTeX level programming, simplifying 
the jurabib.sty. Programming the gui shouldn't be that hard, as it would only 
need a very high level language, which are very easy to learn. If we abstract 
the objects properly, we could even make the gui jurabib and even bibtex 
independent, so that it can be used in other projects.

5. I've asked a question to tex-nl mailing list to ask them what language they 
would use for this kind of project. There are quite a number of excellent 
programmers at that list.

Best,

Maarten


 
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