I agree with the need to use ADS entries verbatim.

It looks like the pybtex folks plane sphinxcontrib-bibtex for this (https://bitbucket.org/pybtex-devs/pybtex/issues/65/percent-sign-in-url-field-raises-an) and sphinxcontrib-bibtex points to latexcodec (http://sphinxcontrib-bibtex.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#encoding-percent-signs). Maybe we can PR a fix to latexdoc?

The immediate ways forward for this ticket at are:

1. Accept manual patches to the bibtex to escape %, or
2. Don't automatically populate lsst-bibtex bibliographies in Sphinx technotes and instead recommend that bibliographies be curated separately in each technote.

I'm hoping to do 1, but will be happy to do 2 to ship this ticket.

Option 1. is fine as a temporary fix if the URLs in PDFs still go to the right place. I think it has to be sphinxcontrib-bibtex that is fixed. URL fields in bib files should not be treated as latex at all. They have to be treated as valid URLs.

These PRs are involved:

1. https://github.com/lsst-sqre/lsst-technote-bootstrap/pull/12 (technote template additions)
2. https://github.com/lsst-sqre/documenteer/pull/16 (Sphinx extension and bib management tool)
3. https://github.com/lsst/lsst-texmf/pull/88 (sphinxcontrib-bibtex compatibility for common bib files)

Looks okay for now. Comments on PR.

Thanks for the astute comments Tim Jenness. I'll put out a community.lsst.org post outlining the new technote features (after I've upgraded technotes to use documenteer 0.2).