Re: [docbook-apps] Biblioentry markup standards -- identifying the type of entry

Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]> Thu, 11 Jun 2020 09:12:28 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.text.docbook.misc,gmane.text.docbook.apps
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Richard Hamilton <[email protected]> writes:
> I’m posting this to the DocBook mailing list, but double posting do
> DocBook-apps because the discussion started on that list.
>
> Background: I’ve been using bibliomixed for XML Press publications. I
> would like to move to using biblioentry, so I can cover more than one
> output style. We primarily use the Chicago Manual of Style as our
> guide, but I would like to be able to easily use other styles.

The bibliography stuff is a bit of a mess. It was originally cribbed
from the Majour[1] standard in the very early 90’s, I believe, on the
assumption that reuse was better than reinvention. I’m not sure what
happened to Majour after that.

> My objective is to create (over time) customizations that would take a
> biblioentry in a consistent format and generate output that conforms
> to Chicago, APA, and other styles.

I’m going to repeat myself and say that I think adopting a mechanism for
generating them that reuses BibTeX or the open citation work I pointed
to before or something else is better than one-offing it. There’s *A
LOT* of variation in how citations are published.

> This first issue I’ve uncovered is the question of how to identify
> what kind of entry an instance is (e.g., book, article, etc.).
>
> I can find no standard method for doing that in DocBook, including the
> Publisher’s schema..

I think your best bet is:

<biblioentry>
  <citetitle pubwork="book">DocBook: The Definitive Guide</citetitle>

> Certain types can be guessed at by looking at biblioset (if it’s used)
> or the pubwork attribute on citetitle (if citetitle is used rather
> than title).

I think the title in a bibliography entry is more semantically a title
citation than a title, so that’s my preference anyway. (In DocBook, a
<title> is usually the the title of a thing, and that’s not what is
going on in a bibliography.)

> complexity. And citetitle seems not to be the best choice for
> expressing a title in this context (especially if you want to separate
> out a subtitle).

Yeah, that’s a fair point. Maybe I’m just wrong about citetitle.

> So, am I missing something here, or is there no standard method for
> defining the type of a biblioentry?

Apparently not.

> If there isn’t an established method, does anyone have any ideas on
> how best to do this?

Add pubwork to biblioentry?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/MAJOUR-DTD-Article-Headers-Modular-Application/3384898287/bd

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]>
https://nwalsh.com/

> I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious
> cult.--Rita Rudner
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