Re: [Refdb-users] RefDB and Jurabib

[doug <dou...@gm...>]

On Sunday 15 April 2007 10:17, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Jeremy Malcolm writes:
>  > 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?
>
> Well, it is probably not worth attempting this with RefDB's current
> bibliography code. On the long run it may be prudent to move to raw
> instead of cooked bibliography output and externalize the formatting
> of the citations and the bibliographies entirely to the publication
> step, along the lines of what citeproc does. However, this will 
> require a complete rewrite of the DSSSL and XSLT stylesheets, and this
> is not likely to happen on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I am sure I have mentioned this before, probably more than once (sorry), 
but such a thing already exists, in some limited capacity (for DocBook 
at any rate).

I called it RefDB-lite and the xslt (1.1?) sources are languishing here:
http://ugo.crl.nitech.ac.jp/~ddb/CIF/skunkworks/xsl/refdb-lite-0.0.0.5a.tgz 
and the documentation is here:
http://ugo.crl.nitech.ac.jp/~ddb/CIF/skunkworks/xsl/refdb-lite/doc/refdb-lite/
and also in a couple of different forms in the examples directory:
http://ugo.crl.nitech.ac.jp/~ddb/CIF/skunkworks/xsl/refdb-lite/examples/

You would probably need to customize the XSLT template that identifies the 
citations, since I adopted the newer DocBook <biblioref> element, rather than 
<xref>. 

And Jeremy would likely need to customize the 
http://ugo.crl.nitech.ac.jp/~ddb/CIF/skunkworks/xsl/refdb-lite/xsl/docbook/common/journalname.xsl
template - to add parenthesis.


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?). 

thank you.
Doug