Re: [9fans] need feedback: bibTeX users?

[James Chapman <james@cs.ioc.ee>]

Dear Thierry,

I use it:

james$ bibtex --version
BibTeX 0.99d (TeX Live 2010/MacPorts 2010_0)
kpathsea version 6.0.0
Copyright 2010 Oren Patashnik.
...

In my area (roughly theoretical computer science I guess) LaTeX is a
necessity (I have to send the LaTeX source to the publisher) and
bibTeX is used by most people to manage their own references. Lots of
people include bibtex for their papers on their publications webpages
to make this easy. This is the only reliable source of bibtex,
'harvested' bibtex produces laughably bad results. However, I often
have to remove the bibtex file and inline the references for the
camera ready version of the paper. I'd say that bibtex is usually used
to manage a library of references that you accumulate over time. It's
not a necessity but an important convenience and one whose use is
widespread.

If you want to work at all you need LaTeX. If you want to work with
others you need bibTeX. You could do without it but nobody else is
prepared too. Trying to avoid either would be like refusing to use
email. When I say you I guess I mean me :)

Best wishes and keep up the good work!

James



On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 12:39 PM,  <tlaronde@polynum.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Since I'm finishing the task I have undertaken---provide a complete core
> TeX system with MetaPost---, there is one piece that is a WEB program,
> hence needs to be translated, and that may be used: bibTeX.
>
> I don't use it myself but since "third millenium state of the art
> academic research" is evaluated by the same algorithm as the one
> used by Google to rank pages: number of citations and cross citations,
> I guess it is fundamental for an author to be able to cite a maximum
> of works he has not read, crediting people that have actually signed
> them but not actually written them, keeping in mind that it is not
> a problem that none of them has ever grasped the subject since it
> doesn't make sense.
>
> The problem is that the version of bibTeX in the sources I have started
> with is 0.99c; it is not rocket science; it seems to me overkill to not
> just handle the bibliography with normal text utilities; and it seems
> that there are other versions in use now mainly with LaTeX.
>
> So questions:
>
> 1) Are there people using it?
> 2) What version?
> 3) Is there now a non WEB based implementation?---in this case I could
> simply forget about it.---
>
> I need feedback since my main engineering tool is still /dev/null!
> --
>        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
>                      http://www.kergis.com/
> Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
>
>