Possible incompatibility with revtex4-1

[ElieGouzien]

Hi,

I've tried to use jabbrev with the revtex4-1 bibliography style following "Using Other Styles" and the compilation fails.

I've checked the .bbl file and the only clear difference is the introduction of {\JournalTitle{*}}. The compilation error is:

\BibitemShut #1->\unskip \def \@bibstop 
                                        {#1}\let \bibitem@Stop \bibitemStop ...
l.66 ...05.2024} {1205.2024} \BibitemShut {NoStop}

If you have any idea of what's wrong I can try to solve it, but for now it's part of black magic for me.

[compholio]

Can you drop your modified revtex4-1 style in a gist and provide the link so that I can see how you modified it?

[ElieGouzien]

I've made a "minimal" example from revtex's sample: https://github.com/ElieGouzien/jabbrev-revtex-bug

The interesting commit is there: https://github.com/ElieGouzien/jabbrev-revtex-bug/commit/0894f8985e1951e8a07a9b9499d009289415c9a2

You have to uncomment %\bibliographystyle{apsrev4-1-jabbrv.bst} and comment the line above to see the bug appear. I suppose revtex4-1 to be system-wide installed.

[compholio]

Okay, part of the problem here is that this style is doing something very strange... A simple test is to use "\em" instead of "\JournalTitle" in creating an example. In order to get your stylesheet to work I have to use (note that I'm dropping an extra set of brackets, they're not important for this style):

"\em{" * journal * "}" *

instead of:

"\em{" journal * "}" *

So, "" is the concatenate operator in BibTeX and works like "A B " = "AB" - which means that I am being forced to concatenate the first argument with something that's already on the stack. It is very unusual in a BibTeX style to have a function depend upon something that is already on the stack. However, this is not the entire story - something else is going wrong such that \JournalTitle is not working correctly even after the stylesheet has been modified to say:

"\JournalTitle{" * journal * "}" *

Whatever is going on there is likely a legitimate compatibility problem with jabbrv. I'll look into it and get back to you as soon as I can.

[compholio]

Okay, there are two remaining issues: 1) With this particular style it is necessary to throw in a "\protect" to keep the title from being prematurely evaluated. I can update my instructions to include this information, as it should not hurt any "normal" styles. You can modify your stylesheet like so: "\protect\JournalTitle{" * journal * "}" * 2) You have escaped spaces in your journal titles. Is this an example that you obtained from somewhere? If you remove the escaped spaces then everything should work, for example: journal = "Phys.\ Rev.", should be: journal = "Phys. Rev.",

It is possible that I can add support for escaped spaces, but that is likely to be incredibly complicated. Is that something that you need?

[ElieGouzien]

I think the issue is solved :

1. You found the solution ; except that the first * should be removed. So it gives: "\protect\JournalTitle{" journal * "}" * I agree it's a good idea to add it in the general doc.
2. The exemple is directly taken from the revtex4-1 CTAN package. In real-life I will not use \ since I use complete journals names in my bibtex files.

I've seen you added the example file, which is nice. I think to obey it's licence we need to explain the modifications. I've done that in https://github.com/ElieGouzien/jabbrev-revtex-bug/blob/fixed/apsrev4-1-jabbrv.bst.

So thanks a lot for the help !

EDIT: You can play with the "fixed" version there : https://github.com/ElieGouzien/jabbrev-revtex-bug/tree/fixed

[compholio]

That's interesting that the first star can (and should) be removed once that fix is in place, that was making me very nervous about this style.

Fixed by commit f17cb2a51e09e2c6a0df7ccfdde57eb2557ce941.