Re: RefDB and Jurabib

Hi Doug,

Quoting Doug du Boulay <[email protected]>:

>
> 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?
>

I've been investigating one of them  
(http://open.comsultia.com/docbook2odf/) which looks quite promising.  
This is essentially a Perl control script that creates the files which  
are then zipped up to the .odf file, plus a set of stylesheets that do  
the actual XML-to-XML transformations. Unfortunately the project  
currently does not provide any templates for the <citation> or  
<bibliography> elements, so we'd have to write this from scratch. I'd  
be more than happy if someone investigated this path. I'm afraid I  
won't get around in the near future.

> 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.
>

Much appreciated.

> 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).
>

Things are a little better these days. First of all, the SRU interface  
could be extended to all other XML formats (currently only MODS and  
risx are supported), so you could retrieve them e.g. as raw DocBook as  
well. RefDB has always had the option to export to DocBook directly.

Next, the RefDB XML output can use a namespace these days. You could  
essentially use a namespaced risx (or MODS, or DocBook) raw  
bibliography and transform that independent of the surrounding  
document format (DocBook, TEI, or whatever).

As for the TEI P4 bibliography format, the structure is more similar  
to risx than to DocBook. TEI P5 will be a different story though, it  
is said to be closer to MODS. But it is probably a better approach to  
use just one namespaced format instead of transforming it to an  
intermediate DocBook|TEI bibliography.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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