[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: DOCBOOK: Announce: BibTex for Docbook
Hi, for people interested in a comparison between JReferences and RefDB I'd suggest to go back in the list archives about 1 year. We had a funny discussion back then. I haven't tested any recent releases of JReferences, but from what I've gathered from the current discussion I see the following main issues that set RefDB apart from JReferences: - RefDB works with DocBook XML and SGML documents, TEI XML documents, and LaTeX documents (with somewhat limited capabilities). Other SGML/XML document types can be added without modification of RefDB itself (just some stylesheet hacking). - RefDB does *not* require any changes in the DTDs. Documents remain valid against the stock DTDs, so using RefDB does not create an interchange issue. - RefDB does not modify the SGML/XML source document. The bibliography is created as an external entity. The citations (which are actually xref elements) are rendered by pulling in the appropriate information from the bibliography element and are hyperlinked (in HTML and PDF output) to the corresponding references in the bibliography. The advantage of not modifying the source document is that reformatting the document for a different bibliography style is a snap. - RefDB uses a bibliography style database to render citations and bibliographies according to a specific style of a publisher or of a publication. This includes aspects like the sequence of the elements (authors, year, title, journal, volume, issue, pages...), the rendering of the author names (FM Last, F.M. Last, F. M. Last, Last,F.M. and all other permutations), as well as the rendering in the output formats (volume bold or italics, journal names regular or italics etc). Both author/year and numeric citation styles are supported. The styles are defined as XML documents. - In addition to the document-based bibliography output, RefDB can generate raw bibliographies in DocBook SGML/XML, TEI XML, RIS, BibTeX and a few other formats. - RefDB is a multi-user system. Users can share a common reference database and still maintain their personal info (notes, reprint status, availability etc). - RefDB uses a SQL database to store the references. The current stable branch uses MySQL, the development branch in CVS uses MySQL or PostgreSQL. Support for an embedded SQL library is in preparation. - RefDB uses scriptable command-line clients as well as a web interface. This offers both a convenient graphical interface and the power of unix plumbing. - RefDB can store far more information per reference than actually is used to display the reference. Additional information includes an unlimited number of keywords, an URL to an electronic offprint, personal notes, availability information (where is that paper copy?), abstracts etc. This greatly simplifies retrieving the proper references and maintaining a large collection of paper or electronic offprints. - RefDB can directly import RIS (the lingua franca of Windows reference databases), BibTeX and DocBook (with a little stylesheet tweaking) references. TEI import is in preparation. Therefore I wouldn't support the notion that RefDB and JReferences are "similar" but the decision is left to those who actually use and compare both apps. To see the RefDB bibliography capabilities at work, I suggest to visit: http://refdb.sourceforge.net/examples.html You'll find links to a DocBook SGML document transformed to HTML for two different biomedical journals, as well as a link to a TEI XML document transformed to PDF. best regards, Markus Michael Smith writes: > > [moving this to docbook-apps] > > "E.L. Willighagen" <egonw@sci.kun.nl> writes: > > > Hi all, > > > > for some time now I've been working on a BibTex like system for DocBook XML. > > I've written an article about it in LinuxFocus: > > > > http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/September2002/article257.shtml > > > > Like BibTex the software uses a file database backend with references and > > refers to IDs to those references. The actual bibliography is autogenerated > > and citations in the article are autonumbered. > > > > The software, JReferences, can be found at > > http://sf.net/projects/jreferences/. > > > > Comments on the article and the software are welcomed. > > The application looks interesting and the article is a nice concise > intro. But one thing it doesn't discuss is how JReference is similar to > or different from Markus Hoenicka's RefDB: > > http://refdb.sourceforge.net/ > > They seem like similar applications. Are they? > > --Mike > > -- Markus Hoenicka <hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC