[tex-live] bibtex's max_print_line

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed Feb 10 01:47:36 CET 2010


Hi Arthur, Oren, all,

    A cleaner, more thorough way of handling things would be for bibtex to  
    understand what a TeX control sequence is, 

Or url.  I surmise it should only break lines at known good places, and
there is no known-good place, it shouldn't break at all, overriding
max_print_line.

    and to not break the line there.

I think that would be much better than making max_print_line into an
(semi-)dynamic parameter, or even a truly dynamic one.  Just because
there is one 100-character control sequence or url in a bibliography
doesn't mean I want every entry to be broken at column 100.

    Would such a change be considered meritorious or welcome?

Meritorious.  Is it something you can work on?

Background: I've talked to Oren quite a few times over the past several
years about making a bibtex bug-fix release, with this incorrect
line-breaking being the principal bug to fix.  Oren had hoped to do it,
and still hopes to (not to mention BibTeX 1.0), but there is not even a
STIX-like ETA at this point.  (Hope this is a fair summary, Oren.)

So any fix for it (from anyone) sounds excellent to me.

Thanks,
Karl


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