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

[Markus Hoenicka <hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com>]

Bernd Kreimeier writes:
 >  
 > 
 > 
 > 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).

Not only this. Some journals format authornames as FM Last, others use
Last, FM, or Last FM, or Last, F.M. or whatever. Some even use Last,
FM for the first author, FM Last for coauthors. And of course the
bibliographic entries can be sorted in any imaginable way - as cited
in the text, alphabetical, by date, reverse by date.

 > 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.
 > 

This is why RefDB (http://refdb.sourceforge.net) keeps the
bibliography as an external entity separate from your document
source. If you switch to a different journal, you just re-create the
bibliography with a new style and transform your document again. This
also takes care of the citation style which people tend to forget in
this discussion (author/year, numerical, et.al. in italics or not, to
fold or not to fold ranges...). With RefDB it's painless. And it works
with the existing DocBook XML and SGML DTDs and the existing
stylesheets.


regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/