bibutil.xml

<Chapter Label="ch:bibutil">
<Heading>Utilities for Bibliographies</Heading>

A  standard for  collecting  references (in  particular to  mathematical
texts) is &BibTeX; 
(<URL>http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/distribs/doc/</URL>). 
A disadvantage of &BibTeX; is that the format of the
data is specified  with the use by  &LaTeX; in mind. The  data format is
less suited  for conversion to other  document types like plain  text or
HTML.<P/>

In the first section we describe  utilities for using data from &BibTeX;
files in &GAP;. <P/>

In  the  second  section  we  introduce a  new  XML  based  data  format
BibXMLext for bibliographies which  seems better suited for other
tasks than using it with &LaTeX;. <P/>

Another section  will describe  utilities to deal  with BibXMLext
data in &GAP;.


<Section Label="ParseBib">
<Heading>Parsing &BibTeX; Files</Heading>

Here are  functions for  parsing, normalizing  and printing  reference lists
in  &BibTeX;  format. The  reference  describing  this format  is&nbsp;<Cite
Key="La85" Where="Appendix B"/>.

<#Include Label="ParseBibFiles">

<#Include Label="NormalizeNameAndKey">

<#Include Label="WriteBibFile">

<#Include Label="LabelsFromBibTeX">

<#Include Label="InfoBibTools">

</Section>

<Section Label="BibXMLformat">
<Heading>The BibXMLext Format</Heading>

Bibliographical data in &BibTeX; files have the disadvantage that the
actual data are given in &LaTeX; syntax. This makes it difficult to use
the data for anything but for &LaTeX;, say for representations of the
data as plain text or HTML. For example: mathematical formulae are in
&LaTeX; <C>$</C> environments,  non-ASCII characters can be
specified in many strange ways, and how to specify URLs for links if the
output format allows them?<P/>

Here we propose an XML data format for bibliographical data which
addresses these problems, it is called BibXMLext. In the next 
section we describe some tools for
generating (an approximation to) this data format from &BibTeX; data,
and for using data given in BibXMLext format for various
purposes. <P/>

The first motivation for this development was the handling of
bibliographical data in &GAPDoc;, but the format and the tools are certainly 
useful for other purposes as well.<P/>

We started from a DTD <F>bibxml.dtd</F> which is publicly available, say
from <URL>http://bibtexml.sf.net/</URL>. This is essentially a
reformulation of the definition of the &BibTeX; format, including
several of some widely used further fields. This has already the
advantage that a generic XML parser can check  the validity of the
data entries, for example for missing compulsary fields in entries.
We applied the following changes and extensions to define the
DTD for BibXMLext, stored in the file <F>bibxmlext.dtd</F> which can 
be found in the root directory of this &GAPDoc; package (and in Appendix
<Ref Appendix="bibxmlextdtd"/>):

<List >
<Mark>names</Mark>
<Item>Lists of names in the <C>author</C> and <C>editor</C> fields in
&BibTeX; are difficult to parse. Here they must be given by a sequence
of <C>&lt;name></C>-elements which each contain an optional <C>&lt;first></C>-
and a <C>&lt;last></C>-element for the first and last names,
respectively.</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;M></C> and <C>&lt;Math></C></Mark>
<Item>These elements enclose mathematical formulae, the content is
&LaTeX; code (without the <C>$</C>). These should be handled in
the same way as the elements with the same names in &GAPDoc;, see
<Ref Subsect="M"/> and <Ref Subsect="Math"/>. In particular, simple
formulae which have a well defined plain text representation can be
given in <C>&lt;M></C>-elements.</Item>
<Mark>Encoding</Mark>
<Item>Note that in XML files we can use the full range of unicode
characters, see <URL>http://www.unicode.org/</URL>. All non-ASCII
characters should be specified as unicode characters. This makes dealing
with special characters easy for plain text or HTML, only for use with 
&LaTeX; some sort of translation is necessary.</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;URL></C></Mark>
<Item>These elements are allowed everywhere in the text and should be
represented by links in converted formats which allow this. It is used
in the same way as the element with the same name in &GAPDoc;, see
<Ref Subsect="URL"/>.</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;Alt Only="..."></C> and <C>&lt;Alt Not="..."></C></Mark>
<Item>Sometimes information should be given in different ways, depending
on the output format of the data. This is possible with the 
<C>&lt;Alt></C>-elements with the same definition as in &GAPDoc;, see
<Ref Subsect="Alt"/>.
</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;C></C></Mark>
<Item>This element should be used to protect text from case changes by
converters (the extra <C>{}</C> characters in &BibTeX;
title fields).</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;string key="..." value="..."/></C> and 
<C>&lt;value key="..."/></C></Mark>
<Item>The <C>&lt;string></C>-element defines key-value pairs which can
be used in any field via the <C>&lt;value></C>-element (not only for
whole fields but also parts of the text).</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;other type="..."></C></Mark>
<Item>This is a generic element for fields which are otherwise not
supported. An arbitrary number of them is allowed for each entry, so any
kind of additional data can be added to entries.</Item>
<Mark><C>&lt;Wrap Name="..."></C></Mark>
<Item>This generic element is allowed inside all fields. This markup will be 
just ignored (but not the element content) by our standard tools. But
it can be a useful hook for introducing arbitrary further markup 
(and our tools can easily be extended to handle it).</Item>
<Mark>Extra entities</Mark>
<Item>The DTD defines the standard XML entities (<Ref
Subsect="XMLspchar"/> and the entities <C>&amp;nbsp;</C> (non-breakable
space), <C>&amp;ndash;</C> and <C>&amp;copyright;</C>. 
Use <C>&amp;ndash;</C> in page ranges.
</Item>
</List>

For further details of the DTD we refer to the file <F>bibxmlext.dtd</F>
itself which is shown in appendix <Ref Appendix="bibxmlextdtd"/>. That
file also recalls some information from the &BibTeX; documentation on how
the standard fields of entries should be used. Which entry types and
which fields are supported (and the ordering of the fields which is
fixed by a DTD) can be either read off the DTD, or within &GAP; one can use 
the function <Ref Func="TemplateBibXML"/> to get templates for the
various entry types.
<P/>

Here is an example of a BibXMLext document:
<Listing Type="doc/testbib.xml"><![CDATA[
<#Include SYSTEM "testbib.xml">
]]></Listing>

There is a standard XML header and a <C>DOCTYPE</C> declaration
referring to the <F>bibxmlext.dtd</F> DTD mentioned above. Local
entities could be defined in the <C>DOCTYPE</C> tag as shown in the
example in <Ref Subsect="GDent"/>. The actual content of the document is
inside a <C>&lt;file></C>-element, it consists of <C>&lt;string></C>- and
<C>&lt;entry></C>-elements. Several of the BibXMLext markup features are
shown. We will use this input document for some examples below.
</Section>

<Section Label="BibXMLtools">
<Heading>Utilities for BibXMLext data</Heading>

<Subsection Label="Subsect:IntroXMLBib">
<Heading>Translating &BibTeX; to BibXMLext</Heading>
First we describe a tool which can  translate bibliography entries from
&BibTeX; data to BibXMLext <C>&lt;entry></C>-elements. It also does some
validation of the data. In some
cases it is desirable to improve the result by hand afterwards 
(editing formulae, adding <C>&lt;URL></C>-elements, translating
non-ASCII characters to unicode, ...).<P/>
See <Ref Func="WriteBibXMLextFile"/> below for how to write the results 
to a BibXMLext file.
</Subsection>

<#Include Label="StringBibAsXMLext">

The following functions allow parsing of data which are already in
BibXMLext format.

<#Include Label="ParseBibXMLextString">

<#Include Label="WriteBibXMLextFile">

<Subsection Label="Subsect:RecBib">
<Heading>Bibliography Entries as Records</Heading>
For working with BibXMLext entries we find it convenient to first
translate the parse tree of an entry, as returned by <Ref
Func="ParseBibXMLextFiles"/>, to a record with the field names of the
entry as components whose value is the content of the field as string.
These strings are generated with respect to a result type. The records are
generated by the following function which can be customized by the user.
</Subsection>

<#Include Label="RecBibXMLEntry">

<#Include Label="AddHandlerBuildRecBibXMLEntry">

<#Include Label="StringBibXMLEntry">

The following command may be useful to generate completly new
bibliography entries in BibXMLext format. It also informs about the
supported entry types and field names.

<#Include Label="TemplateBibXML">

</Section>

<#Include Label="SearchMRSection">

</Chapter>