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

[Markus Hoenicka <hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com>]

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/