mobo@sphinx.uchicago.edu (Samuel Wilson) (11/03/87)
I have not heard this request on the net for quite a while, and it's one which just about all of us using computers in academics can benefit. Are there any good bibliography programs available? What I have in mind is a database manager into which you can enter bibliographic information (Author, Date, Title, Publisher...) and then be able to (1) select a bunch of references for a given paper, and (2) have the references printed on a printer or to disk in a predetermined format (i.e. in the styles of a variety of journals)? Of course I would like the things spit out alphabetically, by date, and all of that. I have tried a program called BIBLIOGRAPHY which was too clumsy and slow, and didn't do the things mentioned above. I have tried to write my way through it in DbaseII and Reflex, but ran into trouble trying to program things like hanging indents in the output. INSTANT RECALL and 3x5 don't sort well enough. I started in writing my own in Pascal about two years ago but got bogged down by I can't remember what. Inertia. I really think that there is a market for a well-written program to do this kind of thing. There must me one out there. Anybody know of one? I'll post a summary to the net. Samuel Wilson Dept of Anthropology University of Chicago ...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mobo
windley@iris.ucdavis.edu (Phil Windley) (11/03/87)
In article <2557@sphinx.uchicago.edu> mobo@sphinx.uchicago.edu (Samuel Wilson) writes: > >I have not heard this request on the net for quite a while, and >it's one which just about all of us using computers in academics >can benefit. Are there any good bibliography programs available? > >I have tried a program called BIBLIOGRAPHY which was too clumsy >and slow, and didn't do the things mentioned above. I have tried >to write my way through it in DbaseII and Reflex, but ran into >trouble trying to program things like hanging indents in the >output. Why don't you just have dBASE output nroff commands and then run it through a pd nroff? It seems silly to write a text formatter in dBASE (which is what you'd have to do otherwise.) This is one of the things that would save us all a lot of time, let each program do a job and that job only. Don't make a database do text formatting, don't maker your text formatter do database management. See "Software Tools in Pascal" by Kernighan and Plauger for an execllent discussion. Phil Windley Robotics Research Lab University of Califo: Tnes #! rn