[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Sun Sep 10 21:20:43 CDT 2006


On Saturday, 9 September 2006 11:37 PM, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, John Rankin wrote:
>
>><snip>
>
>> - when viewing the page in html:
>>   - the reference displays in an appropriate style, as a link
>>   - clicking the link displays a correctly formatted citation
>[1]
>
>What do you mean by "... displays a correctly formatted citation"?
>I would expect that clicking the link would "move" me to the corresponding 
>entry in the bibliography?

I meant:

- (:cite unique-ref-id:) generates a link to the reference at unique-ref-id

- it displays as (using anchor markup for illustration)

  [[#unique-ref-id | Hawking et al. (2005)]]

  *not* [[#unique-ref-id | unique-ref-id]]

  in other words, it displays in the body a suitable piece of text,
  retrieved from the actual reference

- clicking the link displays the full reference, in the author's chosen
  style

I may have the terminology wrong here. I tend to refer to 'cite' in
the body of the text and 'reference' in the bibliography. So I meant
'a correctly formatted citation' to refer to how the unique-ref-id is
rendered in the body of the page and 'suitably formatted reference'
to refer to how the details are presented in the bibliography.

Please correct me if that is not the right usage.

>
>Oh... that reminds me. We need to distinguish between the wiki pages that 
>define the bibliography database, and the location where the bibliography 
>is actually shown. So something is needed to specify the default 
>bibliography (and not just the default bibliography databases).
>
>You can of course have many bibliographies in a wiki... I'd probably very 
>often use one in the end of a page.

Yes and in wikipublisher, I envisage that when publishing an article,
you want the bibliography to appear at the end of the article and when
publishing a book,, you want it to appear in the back matter.

In general terms, the $XMLFooterFmt (= & $HTMLFooterFmt) variable can
be used, I think to control bibliography placement, by translating the
(:bibliography:) markup to generate the appropriate entry.

Interestingly, I think this will be easier to do in the published PDF
than in the html page.
>
>It's interesting that the concept of a bibliography gets more challenging 
>in a wiki setting. For instance, we will probably want a bibliography to 
>list citations occuring in more than just the current wiki page. This 
>means that the directive that produces the bibliography also needs to know 
>which pages to produce the bibliography for.
>
>I'm guessing (:pagelist:) will be our friend here...

In publishing a pdf, LaTeX takes care of this, I believe, but you are
right there is an issue in HTML. I had envisaged that the markup rule
that handles (:cite:) would build the bibliography in a php static
array, then the markup rule that handles (:bibliography:) would sort
the static array into the specified order and insert it into the
$XMLFooter. Since (:cite:) has to read the bib page to retrieve the
text to use in the link, it may as well grab the entire reference.

I believe there is another slight wrinkle: sometime you want to include
an item in the bibliography without explicitly referring to it in the
body. We may need a (:nocite unique-ref-is:) which says 'include this
in the bibliography but don't display anything'.
>
>Anyway, as I've just realized this, there might be other conceptual issues 
>that have been missed. Maybe it'd be a good idea to write something down 
>about the overall desired structure. Any implementation doesn't have to 
>support all the bells and whistles initially of course.

I'd like to propose a constraint that the implementation must be
markup-agnostic, so that I can use it in wikipublisher. This of
course is consistent with PmWiki's standard approach. Then in
future, you will be able to export an entire page collection in
Lyx format and I will be able to turn the collection into a pdf
with a single click.


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin







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