ANN: RefDB 0.8.2 (was: Re: (dsssl) Practical Bibliography question)

["Markus Hoenicka" <hoenicka_markus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

this is partly a followup to a discussion we had in October last year
about bibliographies in SGML documents. Back then I was bold enough to
offer TEI support for my reference database and bibliography tool for
markup languages, RefDB (http://refdb.sourceforge.net). The previous
versions supported only DocBook SGML and XML documents and used DSSSL
stylesheets for the final transformation to HTML or printable
output. The new version 0.8.2 contains also XSL stylesheets for
DocBook XML and TEI XML documents. All stylesheets are implemented as
driver files for the well-known stylesheets by Norm Walsh and
Sebastian Rahtz.

The idea of RefDB is similar to commercial reference databases like
Reference Manager or EndNote: You feed the database with bibliographic
references. You also feed the database with XML documents containing
the formatting information for particular publications or
publishers. All you need to do in your SGML or XML document is to
create links with <xref> (DocBook) or <ptr> (TEI) elements,
respectively. These links encode which references from the database
you want to cite and how they should be rendered. RefDB will then
create a <bibliography> or <div> element, respectively, containing all
bibliographic information and the corresponding linkends to your
links. You include this element as an external entity into your
document. The stylesheet driver files will then format the citations
and the bibliography according to the bibliography style you
need. Reformatting for a different bibliography style requires no
modifications of your document source.

SGML documents can be transformed with both Jade and OpenJade. XML
documents can be transformed with most if not all XSLT processors.

Furthermore, RefDB is extensible in terms of the supported document
types. You can add other document types without hacking the RefDB
innards by providing suitable DSSSL or XSL stylesheet driver files.

Please visit http://refdb.sourceforge.net/examples.html for RefDB
example output from DocBook and TEI documents.

(and yes, RefDB is free and runs on Linux, FreeBSD, and
Windows/Cygwin, at least)

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
hoenicka_markus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/


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