Re: [docbook-apps] improved citation support proposal (RFE 810932)

[Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus at fastmail dot fm>]

[sorry if this shows up twice; am having some, um, problems]

Carlos asked:

> Can you give an example of how would I use this bibliography support 
> for an
> APA style paper? For an MLA paper? I'm trying to understand the 
> proposal but
> I don't think I'm being successful.

If you look at successful existing bibliographic applications, they 
essentially involve:

1)  a method to place a pointer to a bibliographic record within the 
document

2)  a formatting engine that picks out those pointers and assembles 
formatted bibliographic entries and citations

3)  a style file that feeds 2

The end result is that one can easily format and reformat papers, 
seamlessly switching styles (APA, MLA, etc.) at will.

This is the approach in commercials applications like Endnote and 
Reference Manager (which embed xml-like markup in Word fields), and in 
BibTeX (which creates an external file which the source citation merely 
points to).

This specific RFE only addresses 1 above.  It only addresses the 
functionality of the citation pointer itself.

Bottom line: if you do any work in the social sciences -- even if you 
are an undergraduate student -- you are expected to be able to have 
formatted citations like this:

multiple reference citations, like (Smith, 1999; Jones, 2000)

page number captions for quotes and such, like (Doe, 2003:33-4)

etc., etc.

DocBook does not support this functionality.  Our proposal simply seeks 
to change this.

As for the second and third on my list above, the three of us are 
working on this as well ;-)

See this if you're interested:

http://silmaril.ie/bibliofile/

XML-based style DTD + DTD/Shema-independent XSLT-based formatting.

Bruce

PS - There's actually a fourth issue: the metadata model.



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