Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent

[Bernd Kreimeier <bk@oddworld.com>]

Norman Walsh wrote:
> Do the rules ever reorder fields? 

The styles do. The order (author first, or title first, or year...) 
depends on the journal or proceedings you submit to. The elements 
(records) can be in a fixed order (I honestly don't remember, I 
don't think I ever changed the order).

I find the notion somewhat scary though. I know (e.g. from the 
QWERTZ/LinuxDoc days) that having elements in the order in which 
they will be printed makes things easier, but it just doesn't work 
for references due to the styles possibly changing that order, and 
it's a scary way for procedural markup to creep into the descriptive 
markup, innit?

See http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/formats/bibtex.html
for fields and entries.

> I could tweak the stylesheets to
> select only some entries from each biblioentry and process them.

If you want to do this right, it will require the backend to
reorder fields, IMO.

> How does BibTeX deal with punctuation around optional entries?

It doesn't, IIRC. Can't remember whether you get a bibtex processing
error, or whether they are just ignored. That's why I find the
"cooked" entries so scary - another example of procedural markup
creeping in as a convenience. That's all fine if your bibliography
entries never ever have to confirm with a different style, but if you 
publish articles at conferences or in journals, it's bound to happen.


                                                  b.