[OS X TeX] bibtex and Japanese (or Chinese)

[Álex Bueno]

Hi,

Many thanks for the replies.

On 13 Nov 2007, at 12:01 pm, Simon Spiegel wrote:

> Personally, I don't have any experience with bibtex and Japanese  
> but the general question of bibtex and Unicode has recently been  
> discussed on comp.text.tex and the general consensus was that there  
> currently simply is no bibtex replacement which handles Unicode  
> properly (whether there is a special CJK bibtex replacement, I  
> don't know). At the moment, the results of bibtex in combination  
> Unicode files are quite unpredictable and there's no other tool to  
> do the job. Mlbibtex is a project which has been in development for  
> quite some time, but there's no place to download it although it  
> has been presented at various occasions. There's also CrossTeX  
> (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/crosstex/ ) which is meant as  
> a modern bibtex replacement but I have no idea whether it handles  
> Unicode better (the website doesn't say anything about this).
>
> To be honest, I find this situation quite strange and a bit  
> embarrassing. With XeTeX (and the forthcoming LuaTeX) and OpenType  
> (La)TeX is moving fast towards Unicode but bibtex hasn't evolved a  
> bit. Of course, it's always easy to say for a non-programmer like  
> me, but coming up with a bibtex replacement which handles Unicode  
> really doesn't seem like something complicated to me and I'm  
> surprised that there aren't more people who see the need for such a  
> tool.

(What I never understand is the failure to move all digital text to  
unicode.)

Crosstex looks interesting, but since I now very happily use Bibdesk,  
at first glance I don't see what it tries to fix as a huge problem.  
Using xetex, writing bibdesk files in unicode hasn't been a problem  
for me. I should have mentioned that at the outset.

On 13 Nov 2007, at 12:59 pm, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:

> You can probably do this by adding a BibTeX field for your  
> translations, e.g. Title-Kanji and Author-Kanji, then modifying  
> a .bst file to print those appropriately.  If you use XeTeX and  
> UTF-8 for your .tex and .bib file, this will likely work, but don't  
> try and sort by those fields.

That's what it seems I'll have to do, though I don't know if I'll be  
easily able to modify it to recognize Japanese names to correctly  
order last names. That's also why I was hoping there was a package  
for this.

Googling again now, it seems biblatex might be a good package to  
attempt this with, seeing as jurabib only got close to Chicago  
format. Though the prospect of writing the format from scratch is  
somewhat unsettling.

Best,
Alex
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