opbibtex@NEON.STANFORD.EDU (Oren Patashnik) (05/02/91)
I've received several questions lately about where to find
documentation for BibTeX, about using BibTeX with plain TeX, about
programming .bst styles, and about a BibTeX man page on Unix. Here
are short answers to all those questions.
BibTeX, a program originally designed to produce bibliographies in
conjunction with LaTeX, is explained in Section 4.3 and Appendix B of
Leslie Lamport's LaTeX manual. The "BibTeXing" document, whose text
is contained in the file btxdoc.tex, gives a more complete description.
The file btxmac.tex contains TeX macros and documentation for using
BibTeX with plain TeX, either directly or with Karl Berry's Eplain
package.
The "Designing BibTeX Styles" document, whose text is contained in the
file btxhak.tex, explains the postfix stack-based language used to
write BibTeX styles (.bst files). The file btxbst.doc is the template
file for, and contains documentation of, the four standard styles
(plain, abbrv, alpha, unsrt).
The current Unix-BibTeX man page, whose source is in the file
bibtex.1, was written in late 1989 and is about one page long.
There's an old and obsolete version floating around, written in 1985
before "BibTeXing" and "Designing BibTeX Styles" appeared, that's
several pages long. You should ignore it (or throw it away), since it
describes BibTeX version 0.98, whose style files are incompatible with
the current version, 0.99 (to be precise, 0.99c).
All files mentioned in this article are available via anonymous FTP
from the BibTeX area, /tex/bibtex, on host labrea.stanford.edu. All
the non-Unix files should be available on any system that runs BibTeX;
if they're not on your system, please complain to your BibTeX
installer or to your distribution source.
--Oren Patashnik