Re: RefDB and Jurabib

I'm resending this message because this didn't appear in the last 
archives after two days so I guess it got lost along the way.  Sorry if, 
despite that, it is in fact a duplicate.

Marcus Hoenicka wrote:
> > Does anyone think it would be a good idea, and if so how feasible
> > would it be, to integrate support for the additional BibTeX fields
> > used by Jurabib into RefDB?
>
> What additional fields do you precisely need? Right now I'm not
> exactly sure whether RefDB does not *store* these values at all, or
> whether it does not *export* them properly to bibtex.

It does not store them.  Amonst the unusual ones that Jurabib needs are
booktitle, edition, howpublished, institution, language, school, series,
type, urldate, volumetitle, dissyear, howcited, shorttitle, shortauthor,
ssedition, titleaddon, booktitleaddon, editortype, sortkey, annote,
gender, translator, updated, totalpages, founder, archive, and a number
of others, most of which are documented at
http://jurabib.homelinux.org/jurabib/docs/english/jbendoc.html, but
others only in the source code.

Admittedly, not all of these are equally important, and some can use
other existing fields; for example urldate can probably use a secondary
pubdate, edition can sometimes use volume (but what if there is a volume
*and* an edition?), and some of the others might be able to use the
spare fields (refdb_user1-user5 and refdb_misc1-misc3) in the refdb
database table.

But this doesn't really scale too well, so perhaps rather than patching
the code for every new field that anyone wants, there could be an
interface in RefDB for users to add an arbitrary number of new fields,
and optionally to define how these are mapped to RIS fields (though I
realise that RIS isn't extensible like BibTeX is).  I am probably
overlooking some valid reason why that isn't possible.

> > [0] Basically it's as simple as having footnotes that include all
> > the same information as the bibliography entries.
...snip...
> I believe the problem is quite different now from what it was back
> then. If you cut out DocBook from your workflow, all that remains for
> RefDB to do is to export the available data properly as bibtex. There
> is essentially no formatting involved, except maybe providing the full
> or abbreviated names of journals.

Sorry, you're right and I should have been more exact.  I just meant
that this explains why I need to move to Jurabib and drop DocBook
(despite preferring SGML/XML to TeX), as the former supports all the
features that I mentioned needing in that post - even down to enclosing
the year in parentheses for journals that use a volume number, and
square brackets for those that don't.

I agree that this kind of thing is too obscure to expect RefDB to
support, or at least should be a lower priority to implement.  Since TeX
will always be a more fine-grained tool for formatting, I think it is
better to use it for that for now, and RefDB just as a reference
database.  Do you agree, or is it worth trying to duplicate some of
Jurabib's obscure formatting features?

> I'll be happy to extend RefDB's
> capabilities if you can list exactly how the bibtex output needs to
> change. I'd greatly appreciate if you could send some example data how
> that output ought to look like.

Here is an example of a BibTeX entry from the documentation:

@BOOK{broxbgb,
   author      = {Hans Brox},
   title       = {Allgemeiner Teil des B{\"u}rgerlichen Gesetzbuches},
   shorttitle  = {BGB~AT},
   year        = 1996,
   language    = {german},
   address     = {K{\"o}ln, Berlin, Bonn, M{\"u}nchen},
   edition     = 20,
   annote      = {This is a senseless test for testing the annote
field.\par If
                  you are reading this text now, note that you can switch
                  off the output of this field by removing the
\texttt{annote} op
tion
                  \begin{itemize}\item You are able to use lists inside
the annot
e field\end{itemize}}
}

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'


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