bug#69266: 30.0.50; bibtex-parse-entry misreads escaped \}

[Roland Winkler]

On Sat, Feb 24 2024, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> I am wondering if there exists a full Bibtex format description
> somewhere. I can see some hints scattered over documentation in
> https://ctan.org/pkg/bibtex, but nothing is complete.

The first reference I am aware of is "BibTeXing" by the author of
BibTeX, Oren Patashnik.  My version dated 1988-02-08 refers to BibTeX
version 0.99b.  The current version of BibTeX is something like 0.99d,
which gives you some idea of how BibTeX has evolved during the past 36
years.

I am not aware of anything significantly more substantial beyond this
document, which is, I guess, some indicator what kind of questions
people worry about when they are using BibTeX.

None of the documents I am aware discusses in more detail the question
of escaping that you addressed in your bug report for emacs bibtex-mode.
I guess part of the reason for this is that the notion of escaping is
orthogonal to how (La)TeX works and BibTeX follows (La)TeX in that
respect.  There is no escaping as it exists in C or bash.  In standard
(La)TeX, "\}" is defined only in math mode, (La)TeX can handle "$\}$",
but outside math mode, "\}" it throws an error.  If you don't like this
you can change this.

(La)TeX is both for typesetting itself, and it is also a powerful
programing language for how typesetting is supposed to happen.  But
there is no formal distinction between these very different aspects.  In
a (La)TeX document, all rules for how typesetting is supposed to happen
can be modified on the fly.

This gets off-topic.  Emacs bibtex-mode follows the philosophy
underlying BibTeX itself and (La)TeX.