Re: [AUCTeX-devel] amsrefs support in reftex

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2015-10-16, at 10:22, Tassilo Horn <address@hidden> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Hi Marcin,
>
>> Amsrefs is a (sort of) replacement for Bib(La)TeX.  Unlike those
>> tools, it is written completely in TeX.  The disadvantage of amsrefs
>> is that it can't sort entries - you have to take care of that
>> manually.  The advantage is that you program the bibliographic style
>> completely in TeX, e.g. in yur preamble (and in an easy way, though
>> not as powerful as BibLaTeX), so you can have everything (article, bib
>> style and bib entries) in a single file.  (Defining custom field and
>> entry types is also very easy, all within LaTeX.)
>
> Uh, that sounds quite complicated to integrate into RefTeX.  Basically,
> you have to have something similar to `reftex-parse-bibtex-entry' or
> `reftex-parse-bibitem' for amsrefs entries which knows about custom
> entry types and fields.

Well, what I would like to have is not really /that/ complicated (or so
I hope).  The thing I would really like to have is that when the point
is on a \cite (and btw, amsrefs has a bit different syntax for \cite;
this seems insane, but it's not), I can see some details of the bib
entry in the echo area.  I hear that RefTeX can do that (I haven't
tried it yet).

Well, this could be easily implemented using eldoc (at least in simple
cases, where the bibliography is in the same file as the document; but
even if not, this doesn't seem extremely hard).  Maybe I should do
/this/ first, since I really, really need this - I can live without it,
but it's very inefficient.  (What I need is to be able to determine
quickly whether the reference I'm on points to a paper or a book.)

But using eldoc when RefTeX exists seems wrong.

OTOH, the parsing functions which find the bib entry /somewhere/ and
extract information from it would be the same anyway.

BTW, this leads to another problem: general parsing of (La)TeX by Emacs.
AFAICT, AUCTeX doesn't really have this.  There is TeX-macro-boundaries,
but it deals with "macros", i.e., control sequences /with parameters/.
What I would like to start with would be /tokens/ (in TeX's meaning,
which is made a bit difficult because of the
whitespace-after-control-word issue and because of the
blank-line-is-a-par issue).  In fact, I wrote some functions to deal
with that (they almost work, I discovered yet another bug yesterday),
and used them for one nice thing (see
https://github.com/mbork/tex-plus.el and especially the functions with
"delimiter" in their name) - but that's another story, though I'd like
to see that integrated into AUCTeX, too.

> Bye,
> Tassilo

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University