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From: rusty@sdcarl.UUCP (rusty c. wright)
Newsgroups: net.wanted,net.text
Subject: Re: Bibliography Generation
Message-ID: <200@sdcarl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 3-Jun-85 11:45:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcarl.200
Posted: Mon Jun  3 11:45:35 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 07:39:49 EDT
References: <113@epistemi.UUCP>
Reply-To: rusty@sdcarl.UUCP (Rusty Wright)
Organization: Computer Audio Research Lab, UCSD, San Diego, Calif.
Lines: 46
Xref: watmath net.wanted:6519 net.text:430

There is a program that is designed for using bibliographies with
LaTeX; it is called BiBTeX.  Like TeX BiBTeX is completely flexible.
The bibliography database file for BiBTeX is much nicer looking than
refer's:

	@book{kn:gnus,
		author =	"Donald E. Knudson",
		title =		"1966 World Gnus Almanac",
		publisher =	"Permafrost Press",
		address =	"Novosibirsk"
	}

The line that starts with @book specifies that this entry is for a
book.  There are also entry types for article, booklet, conference,
inbook, incollection, inproceedings, manual, masterthesis, misc,
phdthesis, proceedings, techreport, and unpublished.

There are a number of fields that can be used within an entry:
address, annote, author, booktitle, chapter, edition, editor,
howpublished, institution, journal, key, month, note, number
organization, pages, publisher, school, series, title, type, volume,
and year.

The way a type of entry is formatted is controlled by a configuration
file.  That is to say that BiBTeX is programmable.  The format of the
configuration file is an unnamed programming language that is like
RPN.  This configuration file specifies the various entry types and
the fields used with each type (this implies that the above lists
are extensible).

When BiBTeX formats the reference list it does it correctly, not some
sort of "mostly correct" thing that refer does.  The format used is
that specified in the book by Mary-Claire van Leunen in A_Handbook_for_
Scholars.  Probably the same as what's specified in the Chicago_Manual_
of_Style.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that it only works with LaTeX.
I have no idea how much work would be involved to get it to work with
troff.  The other bad news is that the bibliography database is only
in text and so searches will be slow (unlike refer's method of using
some sort of reversed index scheme).  On the other hand you can have
the database split up into several files and you can tell BiBTeX
which ones to search.
-- 
	rusty c. wright
	{ucbvax,ihnp4,akgua,hplabs,sdcsvax}!sdcarl!rusty