Subject: Re: bug#20073: 24.4; "Title of the technical report (BibTeX converts it to lowercase)"

From: "Roland Winkler" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:01:08 -0600

On Thu Mar 11 2021 Basil L. Contovounesios wrote:
> Echo area reports "Title of the technical report (BibTeX converts
> it to lowercase)".
[snip]
> These help strings have been with bibtex.el since the early 90s,
> but I'm not sure what they refer to.  Maybe Roland (CCed) does?

Yes, these help strings refer to the fact that old-fashioned BibTeX
converts all words appearing in a title string to lowercase (with a
few exceptions).  This applies not only to technical reports, but
also, say, to the title of journal articles.  Also, this is current
behavior of BibTeX with a number of BibTeX style files I am using
for my own work.  (Title words enclosed by braces are not converted
to lowercase, that's what bibtex-field-braces-alist is intended for.)

All this is original old-fashioned BibTeX.  I do not know much about
its modern successor biblatex (beyond what people tell me).  But it
seems to me it would make sense that bibtex-mode's help does not
talk about conversion to lowercase if one is using biblatex.