I am trying to use bibtex with scribble for the first time. I have a bunch of .bib files downloaded from ACM to include in a short paper. How can I do this with scribble? I can see a path->bibdb but how can I call racket functions from a scribble file?

ok, i am one step further, I have joined all refs into a refs.bib and loaded it with @(define refs (path->bibdb "refs.bib")) however there’s not much documentation on how to actually generate a bibliography part from this.

Interestingly there’s absolutely no examples on using path->bibdb it seems… I am surprised to say the least.

@pocmatos you got me curious so I searched on github for its uses and… not a single use (not including implementation and documentation of bibtex)

I just finished going through the 5 pages of results as well.

only docs and definition.

same here :slightly_smiling_face:

What I was wondering was … surely the PLT guys use scribble for their papers. Have they really manually converted their bib databases into scribble? and therefore don’t need path->bibdb?

path->bibdb gives you a bibdb?

but it doesn’t seem that there’s anything to consume it….

you will probably have to wait for US to wake up!

:slightly_smiling_face: indeed

are we the only ones in Europe?

:slightly_smiling_face:

assuming you are…

or… an early riser

I am in Europe

Not many of us here it seems

true!

We’re missing a RacketConf — Europe. PLT Team hint

Although I gather a conference in Europe may be too big right now, meet ups - more feasible.

Racket European Meetup sounds good. Who’s organizing?

Heh, I’d like to go to Europe to the conf, but I live in deep Siberia, too far away.

@pocmatos I haven’t used bibdb before with scribble, but it looks like define-bibtex-cite should be close to what you want. The related form, define-cite, has some examples that might also help

@dmitryhertz siberia… wow, the kind of place we only hear about in nature documentaries. :slightly_smiling_face: No wonder your profile says “Working remotely” . That sounds as remote as it gets.

@blachance will take a look

Strange that define-bibtex-cite gets a path instead of the bibdb returned by path->bibdb

Will give it a try.

Strange indeed. I think path->bibdb is something people are likely to stumble upon, so some connection between it and define-bibtex-cite would help

Internet truly is a marvelous invention; allowing distant corners of the globe to converse with each other.

@pocmatos: My bibliographies are all scribble. (As are my papers, web pages, exams, etc.)

@stamourv and CV too?

I wrote my CV entirely in LaTeX, but it would be great to use Racket infrastructure instead.

No, that one is TeX. Started it before Scribble existed, and just been adding to it since. :)

@pocmatos this worked for me, once upon a time #lang scribble/base @(require scriblib/autobib scriblib/bibtex) @(define-bibtex-cite "scribblings/refs.bib" ~cite citet generate-bibliography) ... @(generate-bibliography)

this was in scribblings/main.scrbl for bibtex file scribblings/refs.bib

Is it easier to bring US folks to Iceland than, say, France or the UK? I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland though, so I guess it’ll make a good opportunity :smile:

I don’t get a tourism commission from Iceland, but: - The 20 hours of daylight thing in June is pretty nice. - Icelandair usually lets you do free stop-overs (so you could visit Iceland and {UK, France} for the same price). - Fun small city, and amazing outdoorsy stuff, both. - The Blue Lagoon. - Huldufólk

@greg true, you couldn’t be more in between the two continents than Iceland: http://www.theworldisabook.com/10369/between-continents-icelands-reykjanes-peninsula/

not only geographically but also geologically - a perfect spot for intercontinental meeting :slightly_smiling_face:

@greg when did you propose that? I think I might have missed it. Need to thumbs it up!

@mflatt Currently, if s is a string, then (cast s _string/ucs4 _gcpointer) returns a pointer to the backing storage of s. Will that be true in Racket-on-Chez? If not, is there another way to memcpy to/from a string? The context: I need to convert between strings and UTF–16 and UCS–4 bytes. (I’m also currently using scheme_{ucs4,utf16}_to_{utf16,ucs4}.)

@ryanc No, that will not be true in Racket-on-Chez. The easy answer is to use open-bytes-converter, but if that’s insufficient or too slow, we’ll probably have to add some library that provides more string conversions.

@mflatt The docs for open-bytes-converter don’t mention UCS–4 at all, as far as I see. I thought about doing string <-> UCS–4 conversion in Racket, but IIUC it could involve allocating characters within the loop. (I’m guessing only ASCII chars are interned?) Versions of string-{ref,set!} that use fixnums instead of chars might be useful.

@ryanc “UCS–4” isn’t currently in the set of guaranteed transformations, but it will generally be available from iconv. We could add it as a built-in format if that seems like the best way. Using a bytes converter doesn’t allocate characters, since it converts to and from byte strings.

I’m working(stuck really) on a nav-bar, but I agree a sidebar is a useful tool - and very popular with other modern editors. #drracket