Re: [Refdb-users] Is refdb international?

[Markus H. <hoe...@co...>]

Janusz S. Bie=F1 writes:
 > I hope MySQL supports UNICODE in some form, which would be the optim=
al
 > solution.

Apparently it does, but in the case of multibyte character sets RefDB
might actually be limiting. There are no provisions whatsoever to deal
with multibyte characters. I'm not sure whether this really matters,
but at least the transfer between computers with different endianness
would fail. This could be fixed, however, with only little overhead.

 >=20
 > Another limiting factor may be the RIS format. Do I understand
 > correctly that it is an informal standard introduced by commercial
 > software?

It is a de-facto standard used by the top 3 commercial reference
management and bibliography tools. Meanwhile all 3 are sold by the
same company (www.risinc.com), so the free transfer between these
tools might be of some interest to the company. Unfortunately it is no
"real" standard: no RFCs, no publicly available description etc. All I
know about RIS is from the Reference Manager help file.

 >  BTW, I think it would be good to include the explicit
 > answer to this question in the documentation.

Sure, as soon as I know the answer...

 > Anyway, what character
 > codes are used in practice in existing RIS files? Is UNICODE
 > explicitly allowed?
 >=20

There is no mentioning of character sets in the last Reference Manager
version that I had access to (8.5, today they sell version 10). ISI
Research Soft (their current name) are a US company, and the products
seemed to be geared towards life sciences. The largest public database
is Pubmed which uses latin-1 afaik. So you can imagine that they might
not feel the urge to support lots of different character sets. But
then, only the company knows for sure.

From a practical point of view, as long as the tags are ok, you should
be able to use any character set in your RIS files. They might no
longer be compatible to commercial software, though.

 > Yesterday I made a quick try to install refdb in my office on Debian=

 > Woody. I don't remember exactly the messages (I write now from home)=
,
 > but the configure failed because libreadline is not present in Woody=
 -
 > it has been replaced by something else, which in turn is not
 > recognized by refdb's configure.

I just checked the Debian package list, and libreadline4 is available
in unstable, testing, and stable. I'd be surprised if this lib would
actually be dropped. You just need to make sure that you have the
development libraries too, i.e. you need libreadline4 *and*
libreadline4-dev.

regards,
Markus

--=20
Markus Hoenicka <hoe...@co...>
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/