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).