Adding multilingual capabilities to bibliography-formatting software

Bibliography-formatting software has been widely available for a long time, and can be successfully used, even in a primitive form, by authors and editors to assist in formatting citations and reference lists for use in scientific texts. The available tools are, however, still not easily used with non-English languages, and mixing multiple languages or using several scripts concurrently might give unsatisfactory results. This paper describes some of the difficulties that arise in multilingual bibliography-formatting software, and briefly describes a programmable bibliography processor that aims to tackle these problems.