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Re: Re: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent
It is not my intention to bore anyone, but let me again tell you that
the tool you wish to have already exists and is ready to use. Let's
compare BibTeX and RefDB for the sake of clarity again:
- You enter your LaTeX references into a flat-file database in the
BibTeX format
* You enter your references for a SGML or XML document into a SQL
database. Input can be either RIS, DocBook, or BibTeX. As RefDB is
Unix-style, you can write other import filters in any language that
can send output to either stdout or to a file. Using a SQL database
means better scalability for large collections and added benefit if
you share your data with colleagues (think workgroups, departments,
access control...)
- You use style files in the powerful but somewhat cryptic BibTeX
format for your LaTeX documents.
* You specify the bibliography and citation styles for SGML and XML
documents in XML files which are essentially templates for the
sequence and appearance of bibliography and citation elements. These
are also loaded into a database. This means they are pre-parsed
which speeds up the formatting of bibliographies.
- In a LaTeX document, you specify with the \bibliography command
which external bibliography file to use. You specify with \cite
commands which references you want to cite (and appear in your
bibliography). With the natbib package you gain other citation
styles like textual citations: Miller et al. reported [4] that...
* In an SGML or XML document, you specify an external entity with the
name of the SMGL or XML file that will contain your bibliography. In
DocBook documents you specify with <citation><xref..></citation>
constructs which references you want to cite. Parenthetical and
textual citations are supported.
- You run latex on your LaTeX document. This will create an .aux file
which contains (among other stuff) a list of all citations.
* RefDB uses a DSSSL script to extract a list of all citations from
SGML or XML documents into an XML document (which you can edit to
add other, not cited references)
- Then you run bibtex on your LaTeX document. This will use the
bibliography style you specified in the document and will create a
cooked bibliography in a .bbl file
* Then you run a RefDB app on your SGML or XML document. This will use
the bibliography style you specified on the command line and will
create a cooked bibliography in a SGML or XML file. It will also
create a small stylesheet driver file specific for your bibliography
style.
- Finally you run latex once or twice again to finalize your document
* Finally you run Jade or an XSLT processor on your document to
transform it to the final output. This step uses the RefDB-created
driver files to format the RefDB bibliographies (leaving alone
potential other bibliographies) and the RefDB citations (leaving
alone potential other citations). The stylesheet driver files
essentially take care of character properties like font weight,
posture etc. for various parts of the citation or bibliography. The
citations are neatly hyperlinked with the references in the
bibliography in all output formats that support this.
Please note that neither BibTeX nor RefDB do any
"search-and-replace"-style mangling of your sources. The cooked
bibliography is kept in an external file in both cases. This way it is
easy to reformat your document for a different bibliography style
without touching the document source. And the whole thing works for
DocBook, TEI, and any other reasonable DTD (with a little stylesheet
tweaking, that is).
Once again, more info is available at
http://refdb.sourceforge.net.
Please visit
http://refdb.sourceforge.net/examples.html
to view example documents formatted for two different journals.
I would greatly appreciate if we could shift the discussion about a
tool that "would be a good thing to have around" to the strengths and
flaws of an existing implementation of such a tool in order to improve
the one we already have.
regards,
Markus
Mark Wroth writes:
>
> At 02.01.27 13:45 -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> >[...]
> >I think what's needed here is the equivalent of a BibTeX for DocBook.
> >That is, something that takes biblioentry's and a style and produces
> >bibliomixed's. I think that's a lot saner than trying to get the
> >stylesheets to do it all.
>
> The other major advantage of BibTeX is the ability to have a separate
> bibliography database serving many documents. If you write many documents,
> especially in the same subject field, this can be a big timesaver.
>
> I agree with Norm; a BibTeX equivalent for DocBook would be a good thing to
> have around as an optional addition to the toolset (as BibTeX is with (La)TeX.
--
Markus Hoenicka
hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/