The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

1. Does anyone run bibtex directly from the command line? No, it's an extra step and the syntax is hard to memorize (should it run on the tex or the bib, and with or without the extension?). Instead, everyone eventually uses some form of script that does "pdflatex; bibtex; pdflatex; pdflatex" or something like this. Nice and slick; unfortunately it means that all warnings get hidden from view. A common mistake (particularly when copypasting) is accidentally having two AUTHOR fields in a bibitem, which causes the second to be ignored. No way you'll notice until you look carefully at the bibliography or read the bibtex log. It doesn't help that many of the warnings are false alarms.

2. Writing bibitems is probably as painless as it could be, but still painful enough that most people have "wandering" bib files that move from project to project. Unfortunately, this creates lots of problems:

2A. A book gets a reedition, or an arXiv preprint gets updated. You just update the reference, right? Wrong, of course, because your old references now lead to the wrong pages, sections, theorems.

2B. There are bibliography styles that print DOI fields but not URLs. There are ones that print URLs but not DOIs. There are some that print both, which is redundant. With a wandering bib file, which ones do you cater to? No way to do right by them all.

2C. With grey literature, a URL is often necessary, but many bibliography styles don't print URLs. So you end up including it in a NOTE field, which of course gets it duplicated in those styles that do print URLs.

3. Too many foot-guns.

3A. Bibtex (or most styles) automatically removes capitalization in titles ("Generalizations of dyck words"). Why? Why??? Yes, you can fix it by putting the {C}apital letters in braces. But why should you?

3B. You cannot use the packages or macros from your tex file in your bib file, as it's a separate file. Of course... but that makes you wonder why it should be a separate file to begin with.

3C. Yes, you heard it right: no package, in particular no unicode support.

3D. Basically every bibtex tutorial tells you to not trust bibitem-generating services, even the most official ones (IEEE, ACM). But no one has the time to do this on their own, and it stands to reason that there should be a common source at least for everything that is published and indexed. We got ORCID and DOI; is this that much harder?

1. I might be the only one, but I do sometimes, for the reasons you say. To debug it. But yes, debugging bibtex files is a a real pain.

2. yes, but that is hardly bibtex's fault, would be the same with any system.

2A. (same response as 2)

2B Yes, and so have both fields in the bibtex files. Its the publisher who decided what they want, DOI, ULR or both or neither. Not bibtex's fault

2C dont know what "gray literature" is, sorry.

3. YES!

3A, Think you always will need something like that regardless of bibliography system. The publisher dictates only first word in title is capitalised, how then do you tell it to capitalize USA or Mary? {} is as good as any alternative.

3B. yes. I never had any need for that. do you mean \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

3C. yes, to be safe, one needs these weird latex formatting for foreign characters.

3D. Yes. Well I have the time. When I get a bibtex entry from some external source, It usually needs tweaking. And usually fastest is just to write it manually. But its a a trivial amount of effort

That said, I still feel that I've seen every \mathbf letter used for something other than a standard number set somewhere. But probably not in the mainstream.

Some other suggestion is not actually recommended in the official documentation of amsmath as I recall.

Hope this helps.

  \DeclarePairedDelimiter\abs{\lvert}{\rvert}