DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Dave Pawson <daveP@dpawson.freeserve.co.uk> was heard to say:
| I have no idea what the issues are that make a biblio such a beast to style.

Consider the following entry:

<biblioentry id="Walsh97">
  <abbrev>Walsh97</abbrev>
  <biblioset relation="article">
    <title>A Guide to XML</title>
    <author><surname>Walsh</surname><firstname>Norman</firstname></author>
    <pubdate>1997</pubdate>
    <copyright><year>1997</year><holder>ArborText, Inc.</holder></copyright>
    <pagenums>97-108</pagenums>
  </biblioset>
  <biblioset relation="journal">
    <title>XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques</title>
    <publisher>
      <publishername>O'Reilly &amp; Associates, Inc.</publishername>
    </publisher>
    <issn>1085-2301</issn>
    <editor><firstname>Dan</firstname><surname>Connolly</surname></editor>
  </biblioset>
</biblioentry>

You might want this formatted as:

  Walsh, Norman. _XML: Principals, Tools, and Techniques_, "A Guide to XML".
  O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 1997. Pgs. 97-108.

I might want this formatted as:

  Walsh, Norman. "A Guide to XML", __XML: Principals, Tools, and Techniques_.
  O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 1997. Connolly, Dan. ed. Pgs. 97-108.

The trick is writing stylesheet code that both

- Extracts all (and only) the relevant fields and
- Inserts appropriate punctuation (where necessary)

and does so in such a way that it handles optional fields, reordered
fields, etc.

For any given bibliography style, it's not too hard. But doing
anything that works for you and me "out of the box" is essentially
impossible.

The same code that helps to produce title pages is supposed to be able
to help produce bibliographies, but I haven't (yet) got all that stuff
working.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Mountains appear more lofty the
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | nearer they are approached, but
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | great men resemble them not in
                                   | this particular.--Lady Blessington