[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Fri Sep 8 03:32:45 CDT 2006


On Friday, 8 September 2006 5:39 PM, Tom Backer Johnsen <backer at psych.uib.no> wrote:
>christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Tom Backer Johnsen wrote:
>><snip>
>> 
>> If you want to, you can still create a separate mechanism for working with 
>> the list of refences with forms etc. This might be a very nice solution 
>> for those people who doesn't want to install a separate program such as 
>> JabRef. Another alternative might be to see if there is some nice program 
>> written in PhP that is already designed to work from within a
>web page...
>
>Some PhP procedure is obviously a better solution.  But where can one
>find such a procedure?

Once there is agreement that a bibtex file will be stored as a wiki
page, we can relatively easily write a small script that adds a form 
to that page. For example:

- to edit an existing reference, enter the key into a one field form
  and press Edit; this loads the entry into a form, edit it and press
  Save

- to create a new entry, enter the key in the one field form, select
  the type of entry from a pick list and press New; this loads a
  blank form, fill it in and press Save

- the hooks are already in PmWiki to make this a straightforward task

>> 
<snip>
>> 
>> Normally LyX produces nicely typeset documents by generating a LaTeX file 
>> (.tex). That file is then parsed by LaTeX, and BibTeX as well if citations 
>> are used. So the real work is done by LaTeX/BibTeX here.
>
>What I really would want to have is some procedure that:  Given a set
>of pages in PmWiki in a predefined sequence containing images, tables,
>and references to entries in BibTex database:  Produce a Lyx type of
>file with all the required elements for a book.  I accept the need for
>final adjustments, but that is the basic goal.  How is that goal
>accomplished?

I think there are 3 options:

- use wikipublisher (the PublishPDF recipe); this does everything
  you specify except:
  -- stop before producing the pdf and return a LaTeX file bundle
     instead (this is a trivial change to the server script);
     you would then open the LaTeX with Lyx
  -- handle the bib file (the hooks are there but it will take a
     small amount of work to retrieve the bib file and include it
     in the downloaded bundle); you will of course be able to
     preview the output as pdf using the default template for
     proof-read and revise cycles

- take advantage of pmwiki's markup independence and output the
  wiki markup as TeXML, which can then be processed by a TeXML
  to LaTeX processor; you can use the PublishPDF library as a 
  template for how to teach PmWiki to output a different kind 
  of XML -- it's not a small task, but it can be done with a
  bit of persistence

- craft a specialised HTML template and turn the book into a
  long HTML page, then use an HTML to LaTeX converter; when
  we looked at this before we chose the wikibook DTD as the
  intermediate format, we were not convinced that the HTML
  to LaTeX converters were sufficiently robust; however, the
  state of the art moves on and it would be worth another
  look

When Lyx moves to an XML-based format, which I believe is in 
the future plan, you will have a fourth option: teach PmWiki 
to output LyXML directly. Christian may be able to comment on 
that. To my mind, this would be ideal, but at the moment, it's 
future-ware.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin







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