[sword-devel] Bibtex for modules

[Peter von Kaehne]

On 12/01/11 20:27, Greg Hellings wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> wrote:
>> This is an excellent idea, but I worry about BibTeX being the wrong format
>> to encourage academic use. I love LaTeX, personally. I just spent a day
>> putting together a reader for my class in LaTeX. But I'm probably in a
>> minority here, and outside of math & sciences, I believe almost no one uses
>> LaTeX. It is a fairly old format, so there are lots of importers for other
>> software like EndNote.
> 
> I hear the limited use of LaTeX is pretty much relegated to graduate
> school and students.  That is, of course, anecdotal information.

While LaTeX by itself is indeed fairly restricted in its use circles, I
think BibTeX reaches _a_lot_ further - it is the primary format of all
Linux based stand-alone bibliography managers I know of. In fact going
through my Ubuntu repos just now I could not find a single reference
manager which did not work with BibTex as its native format.

It can be used by OpenOffice, Zotero imports these just fine.

So, I have no objection to alternative formats, nor do I think that
templating is a bad idea, but to be honest, the more complicated the
specification, the less likely it will see the light of day, no?

So, either a single reference system conf entry added or (more difficult
to maintain) a increased list of compulsory conf entries which then get
parsed to create references in whatever format desired. Parsing could
happen as Chris suggested with the help of a nightly cron script or it
could happen with a simple templating as Greg suggested.

Right now we could with little effort add to every existing module a
reasonable reference, could impose some further specification onto the
conf file to make automatic creation simple and could retrieve the
citation with an existing method from the conf file.

Having the conf file as the central place where this info is kept would
allow also third party tools/scripts to create a bibliography of
installed modules when frontends are slow to pick up on the new facility.

Peter