latex rendering with .bib

[KaiWaldrant]

I am using a library.bib file to create a bibliography page on the website. In this file latex commands are used for special chars such as \textregistered. When rendering the website these are not translated. Any idea on how to get this working ? You can find the relevant files in this small repo to reproduce https://github.com/KaiWaldrant/quarto-latex-render-issue.

@article{agrawal2021mde,
  title         = {Minimum-Distortion Embedding},
  author        = {Akshay Agrawal and Alnur Ali and Stephen Boyd},
  year          = {2021},
  journal       = {Foundations and Trends{\textregistered} in Machine Learning},
  publisher     = {Now Publishers},
  volume        = {14},
  number        = {3},
  pages         = {211--378},
  doi           = {10.1561/2200000090},
  url           = {https://doi.org/10.1561/2200000090},
}

should be :

The index.qmd has following settings

---
title: "Bibliography"
sidebar: false
page-layout: full
bibliography: library.bib
csl: human-nature.csl
nocite: |
  @*
css: [biblio.css]
---

[baptiste]

I suspect it is a pandoc issue, you might want to try their mailing list (usually gets good answers).

I tried

pandoc library.bib -t csljson -o library.json

which I think will be using the same toolset to process citations, and the macro is silently removed even if I define it in the bib file (\textregistered is not in Mathjax so I believe you'd have to provide a replacement) with

@preamble{"\providecommand{\textregistered}{\unicode{xAE}}"}

[baptiste]

as a quick workaround, you could pre-process the bibtex file in a pre-render script that replaces the macros, with regex or something like https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/de-macro?lang=en

[baptiste]

Actually, I misdiagnosed the problem – it has of course nothing to do with Mathjax, since this is not in a math ($) environment. Indeed, adding $\textregistered$ in the main text or editing that reference in the bib file, it shows up in the output (without even needing to provide a replacement, I guess it is now in mathjax).

So the problem is presumably that pandoc drops LaTeX commands that are not in math environments for non-latex output. I'm not sure how to work around that here. With a different input format, one could specify +raw_tex to keep the commands in the AST, and use a Lua filter to replace the raw LaTeX strings with unicode or html. Unfortunately, it seems that +raw_tex isn't supported for bibtex input. The pandoc mailing list may have some other ideas, but I suspect your best option is to pre-process the bibtex file with a script to replace those commands.