Ulf Martin <ulfmartin <at> web.de> writes: > I think the crucial point for any TeX community is the ability to use > the rather huge amount of BibTeX legacy DBs. > > How about the state of CSL (or RDF) to BibTeX converters?
I don't care about BibTeX myself, so such things aren't my focus. However, I think a good XML/RDF data format makes it pretty easy to downconvert to formats like BibTeX. Indeed, it took me 30 minutes or so to write a decent XSLT to convert MODS to the RDF/XML I'm using. That was only targeted at book descriptions, so it would take more time for a comprehensive version, but it shows it's not hard. The hard part, in fact, is the logic for conversion, and most of that is clearly documented in the bibutils source code. > bibutils uses MODS as its native intermediate format and converts from > and to BibTeX (not always 100% correct, though). Correct, though it's actually more complicated than that. It uses a C-based internal format that is based on lessons from MODS and from converting the other legacy formats. > Summary > ------- > > So, at present we already have: > > (1) MODS <-(bibutils)-> BibTeX -(bibmod)-> ConTeXt > > For an XML-based format in a ConTeXt context we would like to have: > > (2) BibTeX <-(a)-> XML -(b)-> ConTeXt *We* wouldn't include me. I deal much more with RIS or Endnote formats than I do with BibTeX. But I don't use ConTeXt for authoring either ;-) > using the rather nice XML processing capabilities of ConTeXt for > step (b). > > Now, there is an XML markup for BibTeX: BibTeXML > http://bibtexml.sourceforge.net/ > This isn't too bad, in my experience (it is, at least, lossless, > contrary to bibutils). Thus > > (3) BibTeX <-(bibtexml)-> BibTeXML -(b')-> ConTeXt > > would be an instance of (2). Yes, but BibTeXML still has all the problems of the BibTeX model. > CSL could use XSL transformer: > > (4) BibTeXML <-(XSLT)-> CSL -(b")-> ConTeXt All CSL is is a language-angostic XML config language. You could write a CSL engine in whatever language you want: TeX, Lua, Perl, Ruby, C. *I* wrote mine in XSLT 2.0, but that's mostly because of limited skills with other langauges. I also designed citeproc, BTW, to have both an input and output driver system. So while I use an RDF/XML representation internally, it wouldn't be too hard to write other inout drivers. A next-generation mbib module probably ought to do the same, so that while it might have a richer core format, it could still be fed BibTeX, or even MODS. Bruce _______________________________________________ ntg-context mailing list ntg-context@ntg.nl http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
