Bibliography software; cross-platform-ness

[Anshuman Pandey]

On Sat, 1 Nov 1997, B. Reusch wrote:

> [1] Does anyone use a database to store their biblio's -- with different
> layouts for different purposes, etc. ? If so, how do you get your DB and WP
> software to cooperate?  Since I'm a Mac user, I'm primarily interested in
> Mac (AppleEvents, etc.); still, the question is open to the users of all
> platforms.

There is a program affiliated with TeX called BibTeX which enabkes one to
store bibliographies in a database. Items are stored using entry fields
like "book", "manual", "procedings", etc. Under which several variables
like "title", "author", "edition", "publisher", etc. may be placed. The
resulting bibliographic database can then be read by TeX and processed
according to the desired format, ie "Chicago Manual of Style, "MLA", etc.

The database itself, like everything else in TeX, is in plain text format,
and can thus be ported, like everything else in TeX, across various
platforms. Features such as accents are supported, but I have not yet
experimented with non-Roman script packages.

There are numerous bibliographic style packages which format the data
according to a specific style or convention, but in the case that a
package for a certain style does not exist, you can create one from the
primary template. This, however, requires a bit of work.

There is a TeX port for Macintosh called OzTeX. I don't know too much
about it, but OzTeX is in </tex-archive/systems/mac/oztex/> from the CTAN
(Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) archive. Further information on BibTeX
is also available from CTAN in the </tex-archive/biblio/> directory.
The CTAN sites are <ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/> and <ftp://ftp.dante.de/>.

Regards,
Anshuman Pandey