On 04/24/2011 08:58 PM, Johannes Wilm wrote:
On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Richard Heck <rgh...@comcast.net
<mailto:rgh...@comcast.net>> wrote:
On 04/24/2011 08:30 PM, Johannes Wilm wrote:
Yes, I wrote a small patch earlier. I thought I would try to
refine it and develop it more once 2.0 is out the door. The
most difficult piece it seems to me would be to provide for a
failure free switch back and forth from and to Biblatex.
I doubt there can be one of those, not in general. BibLaTeX can in
principle provide more cite commands than Natbib does, so the
BibLaTeX-->Natbib conversion can't be undone without lots of
special handling we don't really want to do. Some sort of
moderately sensible conversion is the all there really needs to
be---and a warning, when changing this setting, that what's about
to be done can't be undone.
Ok, if this is not needed, and only natbib->biblatex conversion needs
to be provided, then it shouldn't be impossible.
We should try to go the other way as best we can. The conversion can
perhaps be specified as part of the layout material. Maybe one idea
would be to have the citation formats themselves be neutral. E.g.:
CiteStyle Author[Year]
Format "{%before%[[%before% ]]}%author% [%year%]{%after%[[,
%after%]]}"
End
and then the engines declare which styles they support and what the
command is:
CiteEngine ...
Style Author[Year]
LatexCommand citet
OptionalArg before
OptionalArg after
End
...
End
That kind of thing. Conversion between styles could then be done by
seeing if the other engine supports that form. If not, we can use some
default style. (FYI, the syntax of the format is the same as with
citation styles. See lib/layouts/stdcitestyles.inc. It's also a guess.)
Yes, if that is possible at all. The Lyx-file would have to be
fundamentally different for biblatex files (all bibliography
databases go into the header + the bibtex executable may soon
no longer work with it).
I haven't looked at this in detail, but it ought to be possible to
tell LyX to do different things in different cases. I imagine some
layout-like thing that contains all the information about what
cite commands there are, what they look like, etc. It can also
contain other information about what bibliography-related commands
need to be issued, and where they should be put. There won't be
that many options.
yes, but to make this 100% user configurable looks like a major
undertaking. Just to begin with -- you would need to add the
following to syntax.default for biblatex and I'm not even sure that
file has a way of handling the lines I commented below (the ones that
go on indefinitely):
This is no doubt an issue, but it concerns tex2lyx only. We do our best
to do proper import of such files. If we can't do it perfectly, then we
can't. It can't be done now, anyway, because the tex2lyx program still
produces an older format.
rh
