Re: latex bibliographies with multiple databases

Hi Markus,

>  > One interesting consequence of this is that author names may contain 
>  > non-ascii characters.  If, when new references are added to refdb, there 
>  > is no citation key specified, the citekey is constructed by mangling 
>  > primary author surname and year.  If citekey is restricted to ascii 
>  > characters then non-ascii author surname characters would have to be 
>  > stripped or converted (e.g., ä -> a, ß -> ss).
>
> Currently non-ascii characters are simply stripped. You always have
> the option to specify a citation key explicitly when adding a
> reference, using any reasonable translation of the foreign characters
> to ascii.
>   

I'd like to focus on this point again.  I personally allow refdb to 
generate the citekey for me, mainly because it will automatically append 
'a', 'b', etc. if there is danger of duplication.  Automatically 
stripping non-ascii characters from authors with foreign characters will 
lead to some unusual results.  A recent publication from our old 
workhorse 'Häßler' might produce the citekey 'Hler2006'.

There are tools around which attempt to convert sensibly from unicode to 
ascii.  Here is an example using the tool 'konwert':
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ cat name
Häßler, Günter
$ cat name | konwert UTF8-ascii
Hassler, Gunter
$
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Use of this (or a similar) tool would result in the much more 
satisfactory, and easy to remember,  default citekey of 'Hassler2006'.  
It should be a fairly simple to add this additional conversion step.

Regards,
David.



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