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

From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2021 18:11:35 +0000

tags 20073 - moreinfo unreproducible
tags 20073 + notabug
quit

"Roland Winkler" <[email-masked]> writes:

> 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.)

Makes sense, thanks for enlightening us.

> 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.

These strings are present only in bibtex-BibTeX-entry-alist, not
bibtex-biblatex-entry-alist, so I think we're fine.

-- 
Basil