[docbook-apps] Docbook XSL, Bibliographies, and Citations

["Markus Hoenicka" <markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de>]

Chris Yocum writes:
 > use RefDB.  This is the first constraint: I cannot use RefDB.  On my
 > own machine, I am running Ubuntu 8.10 amd64 and RefDB refuses to
 > install from source (it cannot find libreadline during configure and I
 > cannot figure out how to force it to look in /lib to find it).

Although this is a bit off-topic here, usually this kind of error is
caused by missing -dev packages. configure cannot find
libreadline because all you have installed are the runtime libraries
(foo.so) but not the development libraries (foo.a) which are required
to build a piece of software instead of just run it. The best place
to get this fixed in no time is the refdb mailing list
(http://refdb.sourceforge.net/doc.html).

 > For
 > other scholars, they will invariably use Windows and for the ones that
 > I am directly in contact with, getting new software deployed would be
 > a massive hassle and attempting to guide them through it at home would
 > also be very difficult.

RefDB is clearly a Unixish application, not an Endnote clone, so it'll
take some getting used to it for the average Windows user. Windows
per se is not an obstacle as Cygwin binaries are available. I've been
using RefDB at work for more than 8 years on various Windows boxes.

 > So, from what I am able to discover, I would
 > have to write (or rewrite) the bibliography XSL so that the
 > bibliography and the bibliorefs in citation tags would be correctly
 > done in XSL:FO for processing with FOP.  Is this correct and do you
 > have any pointers on how to do it?  I am vaguely familiar with XSL
 > from about eight years ago.  The format that I must be able to use is
 > the MHRA standard.  Also, I would be willing to release the resulting
 > XSL for others to use.

If you're not looking for a reference database with formatting
capabilities, but just for the formatting part, RefDB may indeed be
the wrong tool. There have been several attempts to create XSL-based
bibliography styling tools. The following projects may be closer to
what you have in mind:

http://silmaril.ie/bibliox/biblioxdoc.html
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/citeproc/index.html

Hope this helps
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
markus.hoenicka@cats.de
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