[texhax] (no subject)

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Azzan Al-Yaarubi <azzan.al-yaarubi at imperial.ac.uk> asks on Sat, 31 May
2003 18:46:48 +0100 about how to preserve lettercase in article titles
during BibTeX processing.

The solution is simple: use protecting braces around proper nouns and
other text that cannot be downcased:

  title =        "Resource-Bounded {Kolmogorov} Complexity Revisited",

  title =        "{{\"U}ber diskrete und lineare
                 Tschebyscheff-Approximationen}. ({German}) [{On}
                 Discrete and Linear {Chebyshev} Approximations]",

Don't use them on words that are not proper nouns:

  title =        "{On} {Certain} {Methods} for {Expanding} the {Characteristic}
                 {Polynomial}",

is an incorrect form of

  title =        "On Certain Methods for Expanding the Characteristic
                 Polynomial",

Bibliographic styles that require title downcasing expect to downcase
all but the first word, and braced words, in titles.  Improper bracing
as shown above would then obviate that work, and violate the style
requirements.

There are useful tools for managing BibTeX value bracing in the emacs
support code for BibTeX at

	ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/emacs

for example, bibtex-backward-brace-words, bibtex-forward-brace-words,
capitalize-word, bibtex-tools-find-braceable-initial-title-words,
bibtex-tools-find-german-titles,
bibtex-tools-find-hyphenated-title-words, and bibtex-tools-check-bbl.

These commands are all available in convenient menus, and/or via
function key bindings, and many of them execute external awk programs
found at the same location.

I rely heavily on bibtex-tools-check-bbl for catching instances of
unbraced proper nouns in the 340K+ bibliography entries in the BibNet
Project and TUG bibliography archives.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
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