Bibliographies and BSTs

I’ve been looking at customizing my bibliography lately, and ohmygod the bst file format is questionable. I do not know who thought using Reverse Polish Notation was a good idea. Also things write to bbl which then writes to aux and then it is displayed in the pdf somehow except I cannot find the command that I would need to redefine to get the margin to move only for \bibitems and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

One day I will Tame the BeaST.

Until then, I am content with having figured out how to add doi links as hrefs to paper titles, and also how to add an arXiv link from the bib file when possible.

I am also experimenting with moving the year over to the conference name and shortening "pages" to "p.". Does one really need to know which^th FOCS happened in 2007? Or worse, which citystatecountry it happened in? One of my co-authors doesn’t like having such frivolous information in the bibliography, and I think I agree. After all, it’s not like anyone has ever had to go to a library and find a book titled "Proceedings of the n^th Symposium on blah and blah".

What I do all the time is highlight the name of the paper from the pdf so that I can google the paper and find the arxiv version. Maybe I can have my bib files better organized to help other people get this with just a single click. But I will talk about bib files separately later.

It also looks terrible when not all entries have hyperlinked titles. Do I really want to reorganize all my bib files? Do I really want to spend the time fixing the references that my co-authors add in? Especially if they use their own citation systems that rewrite the bib file every time?