Re: Long file names in Dired

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2015-04-25, at 03:29, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:
>
>> (And I have reasons - basically, BibTeX is a pile of
>> crap. I agree that it /is/ less unusable for writing
>> in English exclusively, but again - it creates /a
>> lot/ more problems than it solves.)
>
> You mean you write in Polish at your universities?

Of course we do, sometimes.  Textbooks/lecture notes, for instance.  And
articles on (non-mathematical) stuff which is relevant only for Poland
anyway.  (Like research on the changing syllabi of school subjects in
Poland.)

> (Not to say LaTeX, BibTeX, etc. cannot be used outside
> them walls of science, of course: I always said if
> writers learned LaTeX - and some HTML and CSS for PR -
> they would put the entire publishing industry out
> of business.)

And - as you point out - LaTeX is not exclusive to academia.  Though
I don't agree with you about the publishing industry: authors usually
suck at typography, and they usually don't care anyway.

>> That said, I like that idea, though I would use
>> BibLaTeX (which is a modern replacement for BibTeX,
>> curing many - even though not all - of its problems
>> (the main one which it doesn't help is the format
>> for multiple authors), or amsrefs, which is less
>> powerful than Bib(La)TeX, but has a much saner
>> format for multiple names (and is /way/ easier to
>> configure than Bib(La)TeX).
>
> I have no experience with amsrefs. I am unsure if
> I use BibTeX or BibLaTeX.
>
> This is the part of the Makefile that does the .bib
> file:
>
>     biber -q ${name} # get .bbl (from .bcf)
>
> And this is the line in the .tex file:
>
>     \usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
>
> So when I said BibTex, probably that should
> be BibLaTeX!

Yes.

> As for the problem with multiple authors, I haven't
> came across that. I have many entries of the kind:
>
>     @techreport{scheduling-of-mixed-criticality-applications,
>         author      = {Georgia Giannopoulou and Nikolay Stoimenov and 
> Pengcheng Huang and Lothar Thiele},
>         title       = {Scheduling of Mixed-Criticality Applications on 
> Resource-Sharing Multicore Systems},
>         institution = {Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, ETH 
> Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland},
>         year        = 2013
>     }
>
> You mean the problem is, that turns out as "et. al."
> in the PDF? I'm sure that can be configured if you
> have a problem with it. I don't, and besides no one
> care for references anyway - just put them there and
> then forget about them, is what people do.

No.  The problem is that if LaTeX happens to hyphenate the author's
name, or the publisher's name, or the title, or the university name,
etc.  (which is quite possible), it should do it according to the rules
for the language of that particular field.  The amsrefs package is the
only tool I know of that supports setting the language independently for
each field.  And with BibTeX's author syntax it would be rather awkward
to implement.

(Another thing - as I mentioned - is that that whole first/von/last/jr
stuff is quite English-centered.  In non-Germanic languages this is
sometimes completely irrelevant - take Russian with its "patronimicum",
which is similar to the middle name, but is someting else (it's
basically things like "John, son of Jack, Smith).  In Polish, we don't
have "von", and using "jr" is very rare, though possible, but seems (at
least to me) extremely pretentious.  Or take Icelandic, where the name
structure is totally different than in other languages - many Icelanders
/don't ebven have/ the family name (and they sort their names by the
first name!).  Or - as was discussed in the exchange I linked to -
German "von" and Dutch "van" are semantically (and typographically)
different.  Or take some Asian languages, where the order of the first
and last names is inverted.)

And there are quite a few people who /do/ care about the references.
For instance, I work for a journal, where we (with a friend of mine) are
responsible for (among others) typesetting the papers.  We sometimes
spend/waste quite a lot of time on bibliographies (mainly because
authors "don't care" - if they actually used BibTeX and not
hand-crafted, inconsistent formatting, things would be a lot easier for
us...).  I even wrote an Emacs utility which helps transform such
inconsistent pile of s##t into proper markup.

Best,

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