Implement TeX-like token parsing in values to interpret TeX control sequences

[MarkusLeupold]

BibTeX's natural environment is TeX, and because of that, the values of a BibTeX database are very likely to contain TeX control sequences. Simple examples would be:

• \"o for the o umlaut
• \bf for bold font text
• ,, for german opening quote marks (U+201E)

It's clear, that these control sequences or active characters should be expanded when the user sees the end result. The question is, when the expansion should actually be done. There are three possibilities:

1. During parsing of the database to the internal data structure of the BibTeX library. This means, that the BibTeX library must implement formatting information inside the values.
2. During output of the database as XML. Then the XML document type (DTT or XSD) must define a format to describe formatting information.
3. During XSL Transformation of the BibXML file to the HTML website. The XSLT then has to do some string parsing.