Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

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Dellu
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Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Dellu »

Non-ASCII characters will be removed from citekeys generated by Bookends.
Why is it important to remove the non-ascii characters from the citekeys?

This change is going to screw me because I setup my system using a non-ascii character, the small capital letter ʙ.
Jon
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Jon »

Because I've had complaints that they aren't compatible with some apps that process the output.

[Addendum, the problem apparently was with Pandoc].

Bookends already removes accented characters when generating citekeys, this ensures that non-Latin characters are removed, too (the original case was a confounding Arabic character).

This only applies to citekeys generated by Bookends, you can still have any character you want in your citekeys. So your existing keys should should be fine. Why not pick a different, ASCII, character going forward?

Jon
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Dellu
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Dellu »

Jon wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:59 pm Why not pick a different, ASCII, character going forward?

Jon
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This change is forcing me to re-do a lot of library setups I already did (and, hopped I settled :D ).


The problem is I made the file renaming format in BE to use the CiteKeys.

I used the latin small capital B to attach on some kinds of references, and the @ to attach on the names of some kinds of references. That was a useful marker to differentiate different types of references from the pdf file name itself, without opening BE.

And a change on the citekey forces me to rename all the files in my library--over 10,000 files. That again forces me to re-index my pdf library both inside DEVONthink (mac and ios) and FoxTrot. DEVONthink on the ios is huge pain to sync. I was hopping I am done with it once and for all (syncing small changes is fine; but whole-library change is very difficult).
Now, I have to do it all over again.
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Jon »

Why would you need to do any of that? This change simply affects *new* citekeys you generate. You can keep your old citekeys and file names and they'll still work. Just pick a new symbol (e.g. $) for new citekeys/file names where before you used the Unicode character.

The goal is to make citekeys generated by Bookends safe and work universally. Note that BibDesk removes the Unicode, and Zotero do does so by default, so this is commonly accepted behavior. Having said that, I'd like other BibTeX users to chime in. If others wanted the ability to have Bookends generated citekeys to contain Unicode perhaps we could do something about it.

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Dellu
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Dellu »

Jon wrote: Sun Feb 05, 2023 8:24 am You can keep your old citekeys and file names and they'll still work. Just pick a new symbol (e.g. $) for new citekeys/file names where before you used the Unicode character.
Thank you, I can do that. This is not that of a big issue, to be honest.

But, I also would like suggest the ascii to be just an option (if it is not a lot of work for you) ?

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krstofr
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by krstofr »

deleted
Last edited by krstofr on Sun Feb 05, 2023 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
krstofr
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by krstofr »

+1
[/quote]

But, I also would like suggest the ascii to be just an option (if it is not a lot of work for you) ?

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[/quote]
iandol
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by iandol »

All my citekeys are mostly ascii anyway so this doesn't affect me personally, but I can understand that using non-ascii characters may be useful. BUT users should also be aware that different tools all offer different limitations and the most compatible route is ascii...

See this post for a great description of the various limits: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/582026

There are a set of character that are highly discouraged for use by Biber/JabRef: https://docs.jabref.org/advanced/fields ... tex-fields " # ' ( ) , = { } % / { } ( ) , \ " - # ~ ^ : ' — JabRef warns when they are used for example.
Dellu
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Dellu »

Thank you for the links dear iandol. Those are very interesting discussions.

I think one of the comments in the link put a valid point against my intention/request:
What is beyond doubt is that using bibkeys with only English alphabet and numbers you will not face any problem in any case, and it is easier to type and read. Why use another characters? The idea is to make unique labels, not secure passwords.
- The thing is: BE is a special instrument. It has offered us the powers that no other software offered. Given these powers, I thought about using my CiteKeys beyond their regular functions.
- I use them for renaming my pdf files. Why? Because I want my citations keys to be available everywhere with the pdf files. Assuming I am writing a paper on my iPad, and have no Bookends there (or any no means of inserting citations). So far as I have my pdf, I have the citation key because it is part of the file name. I can just insert the citation key without the help of any other software.

In addition to that, I want my keys to carry other meanings as well, for other purposes.

References with @ suffix are articles, and with the ʙ suffix are books, etc.

Why is that useful?
I use that information to inform Hazel to run some actions (such as splitting the books, but not the articles). I know I can assign pdf tags to pass informations from BE to hazel. But, heck, I don't want to it manually for every references. Since I have to do the references classification anyways, the citation keys transfer the information automatically.

You see, I cannot suffix regular As and Bs because they normally appear in the title (hence, in the file names)--would cause issues for the Hazel rules.

That is why I like to have unique (unusual) characters on my CiteKeys.

And, so far as bibtex goes, I have never had any issue. I don't know if biber will get fussy. But, I don't care because I don't use biber anyways (too slow to me).

As to Jabref and BibDesk, I do not need them anymore since BE added the Bibsync feature. Another reason I used Jabref was to write XML to the pdf files. Thanks for you, I am now doing that within BE using your scripts. Bibtools run by Hazel takes care of the sorting of references (so that cross-referenced books will appear after the crossreferences: bibtex requires that order).
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Jon »

I'll look into adding a preference for BibTex to allow/disallow unicode characters.

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Dellu
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Dellu »

Thank you dear Jon
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Jon »

I decided that adding a preferences for this was overly complicated and a little bit misleading--the current code converts all the Unicode it can to an English equivalent, it's the rare character that slips through (like small cap B). I'll revert the behavior in the next release to what it was before the 14.1.7 update.

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Dellu
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Dellu »

Jon wrote: Wed Feb 08, 2023 6:59 pm I'll revert the behavior in the next release to what it was before the 14.1.7 update.
Thank you!
Nhaps
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by Nhaps »

It is important not to use accent marks or symbols in the citekey due to the nature of LaTeX and Biber. As an alternative, you could create a field that will help you classify or organize your references with non-roman characters. For example, in the reference below I have two fields (SBLHS and FMT) that help me organize more readily the right output format.

Code: Select all

@commentary{Dahood1965,
SBLHS = {6.4.10.1b Multivolume (Part) Commentary on a Single Biblical Book by One Author},
FMT = {Multi part comm sing book [6b] comm},
author = {Dahood, Mitchell},
title = {Psalms I: 1--50},
shorttitle = {Psalms I: 1--50},
volume = {1},
maintitle = {Psalms},
series = {Anchor Yale Bible Commentary},
shortseries = {AYBC},
number = {16},
location = {Garden City, NY},
publisher = {Doubleday},
year = {1965},}
DrJJWMac
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Re: Bookends 14.1.7: Citekeys

Post by DrJJWMac »

I appreciate the flexibility in Bookends. Flexibility that breaks conventions to work efficiently with external apps should be provided using an OPT-IN approach. So, anything that goes beyond what BibTeX limits in cite key formats should be set in Bookends *by specific request from the user*.

By example, though it seems not likely to be needed anymore, the request to include a checkbox for "Citekey in ascii only" should instead be a request for a checkbox that says "Citekey includes unicode characters", and the checkbox should be off by default.
--
JJW
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