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

[Chris Yocum <cyocum@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Markus Hoenicka
<markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de> wrote:
> 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).

Ah, thanks!  I might try RefDB again once I get the proper dev libs installed.

>
>  > 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

Thank you very much for this.  I guess what I am trying to do is
reduce the number of dependencies and bits of software that I would
have them learn.  Unfortunately for the projects that you cite, they
seem to be rather old and out of date without a larger community
(which is a bit of a requirement because I would assume that my
colleagues would need help when I am not available).

I will give RefDB another shot and see how I get on with it.

Thanks you again,
Chris Yocum