mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

Bear F. Braumoeller wrote:

> I have looked inside chicago.bst, and I cannot imagine any way in 
> which it could be adapted to do what chicago.sty does.  Indeed, I 
> suspect that, if it could, the people who wrote it would have done it 
> all in the chicago.bst file rather than requiring the chicago.sty file 
> as well.
Yes, with all these (antediluvian) tools, there is always 1001 ways
to do things, it is necessary to do things at different levels, etc.

I'm not a bibTeX, nor a LaTeX expert, thus I would just say that
is seems to me that bibTeX is processing the bibliography, and
producing an output file, then the content of this output file can
be displayed in different ways (i.e., styles) by means of more or
less sophisticated versions of the basic \cite{} macro.


> So I'm really not sure what's going on here!  My guess is that, 
> because it is part of the Harvard family of bibliography styles, it 
> requires the harvard.sty file, which means I'm right back where I 
> started.  I don't know of any .bst-only BibTeX styles for the social 
> sciences, I'm afraid.
As soon as what you want is a little bit specific, you need to define
the appropriate variant of \cite{}, that's the way I understand it. More
details by more TeX / LaTeX / bibTeX - literate people than me are
hotly welcomed.


> Next, I don't think that your tutorial on style files and plugins is 
> problematic, but a lot of political scientists who look at it will be 
> confused.  Many of us use R, and many use Unix, but I would guess that 
> most have never heard of Scheme, for example.  What I don't get from 
> the tutorial is any sense of how I can turn the definitions in LaTeX 
> style files into commands in TeXmacs style files -- for instance,
>
> \let\@internalcite\cite
> \def\fullcite{\def\citeauthoryear##1##2##3{##1, ##3}\@internalcite}
> \def\fullciteA{\def\citeauthoryear##1##2##3{##1}\@internalcite}
> \def\shortcite{\def\citeauthoryear##1##2##3{##2, ##3}\@internalcite}
> \def\shortciteA{\def\citeauthoryear##1##2##3{##2}\@internalcite}
> \def\citeyear{\def\citeauthoryear##1##2##3{##3}\@internalcite}
> ...
>
> would be the sort of thing that I would need to do in order to make 
> chicago.bst work properly, but I have no idea how I would implement it 
> in TeXmacs' style files / macro language.  Do I need to learn Scheme 
> in order to do it?  Just a basic example of how to do something like 
> this would be a big help.
Ugh. You say that most political scientists have never heard of Scheme 
(and I believe
you), but in the same time, you send me a chunk of LaTeX which as a 
matter of
fact uses the original, antiquated \def{} syntax from TeX, which looks 
quite like
assembly language, for me. Is it the case that most political scientists 
understand
the kind of TeX code above ? In such a case, learning Scheme should be very
easy for them !

As far as translating the chunk above to TeXmacs macros, I would write :
[[
<assign|internalcite|cite>
<assign|fullcite|<macro|x|<assign|citeauthoryear|<macro|x1|x2|x3|<arg|x1>, 
<arg|x3>>><internalcite|<arg|x>>>>
<assign|fullciteA|<macro|x|<assign|citeauthoryear|<macro|x1|x2|x3|<arg|x1>>><internalcite|<arg|x>>>>
.....
]]

I'm not completely sure of the translation above, I supposed that the 
\internalcite{},
as well as the  \cite{}, \fullcite{}, fullciteA{}, ... macros take only 
one argument.
If they get a variable number of args in different contexts, then my 
translation
doesn't work.

The problem here is that TeX allows you to write quite dirty things,
in such a way that no constraint, or even no reliable information can
be drawn from reading the code about the expected number of args,
as well as about lots of other things, in fact.

Also, in order the above translation to work, you need to be sure that
the corresponding preexisting macros (i.e., \cite{}, \citeauthoryear{})
also exist in the TeXmacs predefined stylesheets. I'm sure for \cite{},
but not for \citeauthoryear{}.

=> I just found a cite-author-year.ts style file in the standard TeXmacs
packages, which contains a macro named <cite-author-year|x>, but
this one gets one parameter only, not three as in your example above.

Thus what remains to be done is to understand how the author, the
year, and perhaps some other complementary info (all these infos
being very probably stemming rather directly from the bibTeX
output) is encoded inside only 1 arg in the TeXmacs version
of \citeauthoryear{}.