Re: bibliography with certain canonical reference

Hi Hraban,

Yes, I think this is a very reasonable suggestion.

I am currently writing several chapters on bibliography for ANSS-CE, and 
I have in fact just completed Draft No. 1 of that part. This work led me 
to test |context-sbl| quite extensively. For the moment, it remains an 
external module, and these tests also brought me into contact with its 
author, Joe McCollum, as well as with Kirk Lowery, who has considerable 
experience with |biblatex| and complex bibliographic modelling.

There seem to be two related questions here.

First, I agree that integrating the SBL module into the ConTeXt 
distribution could be a very good thing. At the same time, my recent 
tests suggest that there is still a little work to do before the module 
can really be considered optimal. I have found a few small points that 
could be improved, especially in some of the less common cases involving 
ancient texts, canonical references, multilingual material, and related 
bibliographic structures.

Whether |context-sbl| should become part of the distribution is of 
course something for Hans and Joe to decide. If that is not desirable, 
then restructuring the repository so that it can be installed and 
updated as a normal ConTeXt module would already be a substantial 
improvement.

There is also, I think, a second and more general direction worth 
exploring. LMTX now provides very powerful facilities for Unicode, 
scripts, language handling and bidirectional typesetting. It might 
therefore be possible to make better use of these native capabilities 
for genuinely complex bibliographies — complex not because bibliography 
is conceptually exotic, but because it is never entirely simple to 
typeset a single bibliography containing, for example, Arabic, Hebrew, 
Syriac, Greek, English, German, Russian, transliterations and 
translations, while keeping the bibliographic style itself coherent.*

I have begun experimenting in that direction as well, still within 
ConTeXt’s native |publications| architecture rather than by creating a 
separate bibliography processor. The idea is to distinguish, for 
example, the original-script form of a title from its transliteration 
and translation, while leaving ConTeXt/LMTX responsible for the actual 
script, font, language and direction handling.

I would be happy to help test any reorganization of |context-sbl|, and I 
would prefer not to fork Joe’s project independently without first 
discussing it with him.

Best,
JP

* See here a PDF of such a test.

Le 17/08/2026 à 09:10, Henning Hraban Ramm a écrit :
> Am 17.08.26 um 06:31 schrieb Jean-Pierre Delange via ntg-context:
>> I use specifications such as APA or Chicago myself, and I think they 
>> are very good tools for ordinary bibliographic work. But I would 
>> still encourage you, when you have the opportunity, to experiment 
>> with | context-sbl|.
> SBL see https://github.com/jjmccollum/context-sbl
>
>
> Wouldn’t it make sense to include the SBL style in the distribution?
>
> If not: Could the author (or maintainer) please restructure the 
> repository so that we can make it installable as a module?
> (Of course we could fork and change it accordingly. I don’t really 
> want to do it myself, since I never needed a proper bibliography.)
>
>
> Hraban
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