BibTeXu: a Unicode compliant version of BibTeX
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BibTeXu is the Unicode-compliant version of BibTeX, that reads (only)
UTF-8 encoded files. It was written by Yannis Haralambous and his
students of Télécom Bretagne.
New features in this tool include:
* UTF-8 compatibility of Unicode encoding
* integration of sort and case-change routines from the ICU library
* dependency on Unix locale (which can also be indicated manually
through a command line option)
In less technical terms, BibTeXu allows the processing of
bibliographic references in all scripts of the world while leaving
some flexibility in the method of sorting and changing of case.
The first release of BibTeXu (sources + precompiled binaries) was
dated on 2009-09-23, which appeared on the website by Yannis [1].
It was later presented at Journée GUTenberg, a conference in France,
on 2009-11-21 [2, 3].
References:
[1] http://omega2.enstb.org/yannis/ (dead link)
[2] https://www.gutenberg.eu.org/Journee-GUTenberg-2009
[3] Lettre GUTenberg 36 published in 2010
Status of BibTeXu in TeX Live
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BibTeXu has been integrated into TeX Live 2010.
The one shipped with TL is updated so that BibTeX, BibTeX8 and BibTeXu
share more or less the same behavior wrt memory allocation, etc.
Peter Breitenlohner put in the massive efforts needed to make this
work in the TL build system and use the same ICU library as XeTeX.
The BibTeXu that shipped with TL did not work as expected before 2018,
but in 2019 a rework started and it works perfectly again since 2022.
The files in examples/ show the expected behavior:
* test.tex: the input XeLaTeX source, which uses a Unicode font
covering Latin, Greek and Chinese
* test.bib: the input BIB file
* test.bbl: the output of BibTeXu (with options -l fr -o fr)
* test.pdf: final output of XeLaTeX
The above files were prepared by Yannis using BibTeXu 2009-09-23 with
ICU 4.2.1, and you will get effectively the same result using TL2022
by executing the following lines:
$ xelatex test
$ bibtexu -l fr -o fr test
$ xelatex test
This README file was written by TeX Live team, on 2022-09-10.
Public domain.
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