Re: RefDB and Jurabib

On 4/16/07, Markus Hoenicka <[email protected]> wrote:

> Quoting doug <[email protected]>:
> > I think it took me about a month of Sunday afternoons to assemble
> RefDB-lite,
> > so I would really, really like to think that someone somewhere might
> actually
> > find a use for this thing (if it couldn't be rolled into the RefDB
> > distribution in some minor capacity?).


> On the long run we'd have to reorganize the XSLT code in a way to
> create TEI as well as DocBook output. I'm sure these output formats
> can share code to some degree. A different story is SGML which I still
> have to support (in order to generate word processor compatible
> output) - this will require an entirely new implementation in DSSSL.

As I recall, that was a route to RTF format no? Maybe now with
the MS word and OpenOffice.org XML formats there may be other
pure XSLT based avenues?

> If we were able to refactor refdb-lite to do at least what the current
> RefDB code does, I'd be happy to roll it into the RefDB distribution
> in more than just a minor capacity. We should probably take our time
> and extend the code along with the extended data model that is
> supposed to be included in post-1.0 releases of RefDB.
>
> It will probably take me as many Sunday afternoons to understand your
> code as it took you to write it. Would you be able to spend some more
> time in the future on this project?

It was written at a time when I had toooo much free time on my hands.
But I would be prepared to spend some more time  on it, and happy to try and
explain the inner workings if you were of a mind to adapt or recode to some
other style/purpose.

> One more thing. I noticed you had hacked a CGI script to retrieve
> references from RefDB on the fly. While I believe that it is always
> better to have the references as an XML file along with your document
> (only then you can validate it), RefDB 0.9.9 will have a SRU interface
> which allows retrieving datasets via an URL. refdb-lite could be
> changed to use the SRU interface for this purpose.

Basically the way it works was to suck all the references out of RefDB in RISX
format, then XSLT transform them to my arbitrary DocBook raw format
(about 5% of the code),
then format DocBook raw according to your citestylex specs (about 95%
of the code). It also works fine with a separate DocBook raw
bibliography file.  The XSLT to extract and organise the RISX could be
reused to make it a distinct two step process,
saving DocBook raw to a separate file and then applying formatting afterwards.
(though I recall that my DocBook raw intermediate format may have had some
shortcomings).

This also means that opportunities for code sharing with a TEI output option
may be quite limited ( I have never even looked at TEI to see if there are
similar raw bibliography structuring conventions).

cheers
Doug

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