Sonny Software

Well, the problem is when there is no "standard". BibTeX is flawed and ancient, and its ascii limitations are due to technical inertia, not common sense. So, other people made new packages in the TeX world that do support unicode, and now you have to deal with a complex mess of competing tools with different limitations. Do you always just fall back to the lowest common denominator, and accept you are chaining users to arbitrary conventions and technical flaws that are 40 years old (ASCII is even older)? This is only amplified when other systems (e.g. citeproc) also now use citekeys and handle unicode without issue. At what point do we drop backwards compatibility with ancient software, especially for a tool like Bookends that is only tangentially part of the TeX world, itself a marginal part of the technical publishing sphere? There is no straightforward solution here...

Do not mistake setting a base standard as default and providing an opt in method to move beyond with falling back and chaining to a punishing limitation.

I'm not sure why this thread is being revisited. Bookends already excludes accents when it generates citekeys. AFAICT the "opt in" comment refers to generating file names for attachments, in which case the default is to use Unicode. The only reason ASCII-only option was added later is that some people had problems when the file was moved to other OS's (Windows and/or Linux, I believe). The same was true for using underscores instead of spaces. But Mac users expect to use their own language character sets when naming files, so the use of Unicode is, and will remain, the default behavior.

Jon
Sonny Software

Apologies. The clarification is appreciated. Clearly, I misunderstood the reason behind the request for a checkbox to limit cite keys to ASCII, especially since I only use ASCII in cite keys if only for the (perhaps unfounded) fear that unicode is not the most well-implemented standard in other apps *even on macOS* (e.g. BibTeX for LaTeX compilation of documents) and I do not use cite keys to generate file names for attachments (although I see the utility).