Re: bibmodule requests

[Mark Smith <mark@bbprojects.net>]

Taco Hoekwater wrote:

>Conceptually, the .bib format does not really exist where the module
>is involved. I consider the .bbl file to be the actual source
>database (this is why there is a \usepublications command).
>If someone doesn't want the 1995a item in the bbl, just delete it
>for the bbl file and never run bibtex again. (a future version
>of the bib module will support MlBibTeX's XML format, when that
>becomes available).

I'm no particular fan of the bibtex format myself, but I stick with it, because its the only thing that works everywhere I need it to and it rarely give me headaches.

Taco's post prompted me to actually take a look at .bbl files for the first time.

Taco, are you advocating that for ConTeXt we use skip to using the .bbl file as the point at which we edit our ref files if we are looing for any kind of non-standard output until such time as something "better" becomes available ?

(I've nothing against that in principle. Its just as accessible and manageable in an editor as .bib, but I don't think this is going to be popular until such time as we have tools for bbl file management e.g. a la BibDesk on OS X.)

In any case, I don't get the logic behind part of the .bbl syntax. We have e.g.:

        \startpublication[k=Justerini2005a,t=article,
        a={Justerini et~al.},y=2005a,
        n=16,s=BDBH00a]
        \artauthor[]{G.}[G.]{}{Justerini}
        \artauthor[]{A.}[A.]{}{Brooks}
        ...etc...
        \pubyear{2005\maybeyear{a}}
        ...etc...
        \stoppublication
        
can this perhaps be simplified in defaults or settable via a switch to:

        
        \startpublication[k=Justerini2005a,t=article,
        a={Justerini et~al.},y=2005,
        n=16,s=BDBH00a]
        \artauthor[]{G.}[G.]{}{Justerini}
        \artauthor[]{A.}[A.]{}{Brooks}
        ...etc...
        \pubyear{2005}
        ...etc...
        \stoppublication
        
?

Put another way, what is the rationale behind having e.g.:

        y=2005a instead of y=2005
        
and:

        \pubyear{2005\maybeyear{a}} instead of \pubyear{2005}
        
?

Another minor question: why are the text contents of the abstract field hard-wrapped ?

No doubt there are good reasons for all of these.

mark.