BibTeX

I was talking to Mike today about bibliographies, and why nobody bothers to put theirs on the Web.

The answer: tool support. I've got a database of 200-odd papers, articles, and websites. Ones that need a Web reference have a \url{} entry in the Note field. The tool I use (Bibdesk) is also crap at standards, so I have to manually strip the curly brackets from around numbers, do the LaTeX special characters, and so on.

Then I come to generating stuff for the Web.

My ideal would be a pretty, XHTML 1.1 page with URLs and local file links. Even better if it's got some kind of smarts (pages per author, customisable style sheet, etc.).

Instead, we have:

hevea

Converts TeX to HTML. Does OK, but spits out HTML 4.0 Transitional with big ol' FONT tags, no hyperlinks, no file links, etc. (partially because it takes the data from the presentation file, not the bibliographic database).

bibtex2html

Big ol' package, which sort of does the job. It prints out my notes, so links come out twice — my problem to fix. However, it spazzes up the annotation/abstracts (linebreaks? what linebreaks?).

What I'd like is a really intelligent parser that will use BibTeX's implicit ontology to generate OWL-DL which I can then query and format using some standard tools. Then I'll wake up.

Ah hell, I'll just put up the plain pages.

Posted at 2004-04-30 15:30:33 by Richard • Link to BibTeX
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