ANN: refdb-1.0.0-pre1 available for testing

Hi,

I've finished and uploaded a new prerelease of RefDB:

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/pre/refdb-latest.tar.gz

The full list of changes is appended below. I'd like to highlight
three noteworthy changes in this release:

1) RefDB now supports (with minor glitches) popular bibliography
   styles like AMA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian

2) RefDB now supports bibliographies for RTF documents. The procedure
   is explained in the manual shipped with the prerelease, but in
   brief it works as follows: refdbnd creates a Makefile and a
   skeleton RTF document. Insert citations like [[Miller1999-X]] or
   [[Miller1999-X][Doe2001-X]] as plain text using your word
   processor, and then run "make". For an input file "foo.rtf" you'll
   get an output file "foo.refdb.rtf" which contains the bibliography
   and the formatted citations. I've tested this stuff with OpenOffice
   and AbiWord with success. I'd be glad to get feedback from other
   users as there are certainly some glitches.

3) RefDB now supports custom driver files for XML bibliographies. This
   is not as straightforward as you may think, but it is explained in
   the manual. The goal is to apply custom formatting to the parts of
   a XML document *not* managed by RefDB independent of other users,
   even independent of other documents.

There were no changes in the database schemas, so this release should
work with your existing 0.9.9 databases. The only problem you may run
into is the change of the content model of unpublished (UNPB)
references. Please see the UPGRADING file for instructions.

As always, feedback is more than welcome to further improve the tool.

regards,
Markus


Bugfixes:

- assorted stylesheet fixes for namespaced XML output

- fixed bibliography sorting order if author name is missing

- fixed a style export bug

- refdb-init no longer attempts to add schemas.xml as a style


Improvements:

- now creates bibliographies for RTF documents (still considered
  experimental)

- added styles for some common formats like AMA, APA, Chicago,
  Harvard, MLA, Turabian, as well as for the biomedical journals CHA-MC
  and JPET

- the web interface now supports result list paging, i.e. the query
  results and index searches no longer show the whole list of 5000+
  matches :-) but only a limited (configurable) number at a time. You
  can conveniently page forward or back using buttons.

- you can now provide driver files to the XML bibliography processing
  tools, e.g. to use custom formatting of the parts not managed by
  RefDB independent of other users on your system.


Backwards-incompatible changes:

- UNPB references are now considered not-yet-accepted INPR articles
  and thus use part data, just like JOUR. Previous versions have
  treated UNPB like an unpublished BOOK or RPRT. The current behaviour
  is more convenient for people who write more articles than books.


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


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