tmalsburg/helm-bibtex

Unicode Support

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malb commented

Hi there,

I made a series of changes to bibtex-completion and helm-bibtex and this ticket is to check if you'd be interested in me doing a PR.

  1. parsebib has unicode support built in, but it's not enabled. We could (optionally or unconditionally) enable it in bibtex-completion.el:

    collect (let* ((entry (parsebib-read-entry entry-type (point) ht-strings nil t))

  2. This will cause some problems because parsebib then also propertizes the outputs (italics et al), so we could flet parsebib--convert-tex-italics and friends to not do that (or we remove the properties again)

  3. Helm has diacritics support, which can be enabled to passing :diacritics t when building the source in helm-bibtex.el. This could be enabled conditionally.

This together seems to work well: I can search for e.g. Damien Stehlé's papers by typing "Stehle".

tmalsburg commented

Hi Martin, I've been using Unicode in my bibliography for many years and it's working without any issues. Could you please explain what exactly is missing wrt Unicode?

Point 2: I don't understand the point about italics. Are there titles that include italics? And is it necessary to display them in helm-bibtex? I just checked and found zero instances of italics in my bibliography. An example would be useful.

Re point 3: There is a defcustom for diacritics in helm (helm-mode-ignore-diacritics). Is it a good idea to override the user's own setting?

malb commented

hey :) Yes, unicode in the bib file works well, but if the bib file has e.g. \'e or {\e} this doesn't get converted to é and this makes it harder to search.

Re 2: parsebib chooses to translate \emph{foo} into a propertised string with italics if you enable the "parse latex to unicode" flag. This wouldn't be my choice, just something to keep in mind should we enable this flag.

Re 3: Uh, you're right, this isn't needed, sorry for that

So my question boils down to: do we want to add a defcusom bibtex-completion-parse-latex-to-unicode ?

malb commented

Let me just send a PR and you can decide to accept or reject it, no need to be this meta on reflection

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