How to use it with a bibTeX file in Russian

[tex-apprentice]

The manual says (page 4):

    Unicode            Any non-ASCII characters are prohibited in the entire .bib file.

How does one use it with a BibTeX file in Russian, like for example?

@book{Lebedev-rus,
  author = {Н. Н. Лебедев},
       title = {Специальные функции и их приложения},
address = {Москва},
publisher = {Гос. изд-во физико-матем. лит-ры},
        year = {1963},
      pages = {359},
      langid = {russian},
        url = {https://ikfia.ysn.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Lebedev1963ru.pdf},
}

Needless to say that Unicde is the default encoding of TeX now and has been for over 4 years already.

[yegor256]

@tex-apprentice you do understand that "References" printed from this bib file will be unreadable by anyone who doesn't speak Russian?

[tex-apprentice]

I understand Yegor! It is very much in the same way when you write references in English for someone that does not speak English. One of the beauties of TeX is that you can write in more than 4,000 languages written in about 500 different scripts, including Cyrillic, Greek, Polish, Turkish, Hebrew, Haragana, Kitagana, Arabic, Chinese ... that can only be written in Unicode!

When you write something, especially a reference, you need to be true to what you writing and not to whoever is going to read it -- which in general, you have no idea who they are and what languages they speak.

Russian can be written in the Latin alphabet, in the beggining of the Internet all Russian conversation on email ana posts used to use the Latin script. That is NOT the case with some 4K other languages that only have representations in Unicode.

Unicode is the default character encoding of TeX since 2019.

[yegor256]

@tex-apprentice APA suggests, wherever possible, to transliterate non-Latin references: https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/transliterated-titles-references One more link: https://libguides.nie.edu.sg/c.php?g=927877&p=7038397

What do you think?

[tex-apprentice]

That was used way long ago, when:

1. There were no Cyrillic fonts broadly available
2. Operating Systems did not deal with Unicode
3. TeX did not write in Cyrillic, at least easily

and the Latin alphabet was your only way out. You can still find transliteration here and there, but it is fast becoming really rare, and the new generation of scientists do not even know what that is.

Literally if you do not understand Chinese, you ALSO do not understand:

  Gāo jì xiào lǐ cái zhuān yuán zhī gè rén shāng yè mó shì yǔ zhí néng jī chǔ de tàn tǎo yǐ yín háng wèi yán jiū duì xiàng

People that recommend transliteration these days, like these links above, are just invested in their old ways and do not understand modern computing. The web-pages have an appearance and examples of new, but the literally were written in 1923.

On top of that there are the books which are written in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, ... and they need most of their biblio using Unicode.

There is a LOT of ongoing work to bring Unicode to BibTeX. Bibtex8, bibtexu and biblatex are some of the examples. To bring Unicode into bibtex is good form, not bad style.

[yegor256]

@tex-apprentice this discussion may be relevant: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/184524/is-it-fair-to-not-transliterate-non-english-sources-in-the-bibliography

[tex-apprentice]

@yegor256 Thanks for pointing this very important discussion on SX. If you read it all, you can see, it is mostly a confirmation of what I have been saying. Transliteration is a very old and cumbersome system created for representation of sounds one one laguage into another, during time where typesetting on a script different of Latin was nearly impossibe.

Today, the situation is completely different. You can change your keyboard input sequence from

 English --> Chinese --> Russian --> Arabic --> Devanagari ....

with just two clicks. You can use the NOTO fonts to typeset (TeX and otherwise) in more than 5,000 languages in more than 400 scripts. This is the beauty of today vs. the past.

[yegor256]

@tex-apprentice in particular, I like this comment from the SX page: "It’s not about pronunciation at all. It’s about the reader being able to actually do things with the citation, such as remember or copy the name so that they can look it up later." If the text is in Russian (or Chinese), the reader won't be able to remember it and/or spell out. It would be just a mess of symbols for him. Transliteration solves the problem. The reader still doesn't know what is "Specialnie funkcii i ih prilozhenija", but at least it's a readable piece of text for him. Moreover, he can type it. Do you know how to type this text, using your keyboard (even if you have Chinese layout): 计算机编程. No, you don't, unless you speak Chinese. However, this one you can easily type: jìsuànjī biānchéng (even if you don't understand the meaning).

[tex-apprentice]

@yeagor No! That argument is no good! It is a thousand times easier (and better) to copy and paste something with your mouse and save for later than trying to remember a pronunciation that you saw before.