BibTEX yesterday, today, and tomorrow
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1. an entry For example you might want to add a note field to an entry in a public database file without having to repeat in your own personal database file all the information in that entry MODIFY laws of the game note Law 8 discusses restarts The MODIFY command s database key should match the one from the public database e Distinguishing among identical database keys If you are using two different database files that happen to use the same database key for differ ent entries you will be able to specify which entry you want by using a citation of the form cite filename database key e A bib file extraction mode BIBTEX 1 0 will have a mode that will let you extract just the information you need into a small bib file For example if you are submitting a paper to a jour nal that wants a bib file in addition to a tex file but the bibliographic database you are us ing for the paper is huge you can use the ex traction mode to put just the entries you need for the paper into a separate bib file that you can then send to the journal e A bibtexoptions IA T EX command Com munication from IA TeX to BIBTEX 1 0 will improve with this command e Extensions to the cite command Many ci tation styles aren t handled very gracefully by JA TEX s current cite command BIBTEX 1 0 and IA TEX will more directly support more flexible cite commands e Also appeared as Sometimes a work appears in two2. different forms for example as a journal article and then later in the author s collected works BIBTEX 1 0 will have a mechanism to handle this BIBTEX yesterday today and tomorrow e Name handling BIBTEX 1 0 will have enhanced but upward compatible name processing for example for complicated Spanish surnames and for inverted order Asian names e Standard style changes There will be lots of additions to the BIBTEX 1 0 standard styles allowing many more options e New fields The standard styles will also include a bunch of fields that are not now a part of the standard styles including day isbn issn keywords eprint translator and url e New entry types There will also be a few new entry types including PERIODICAL and per haps PATENT e bst language changes There will be a few mi nor but compatible changes to the bst lan guage e btxmac tex update These macros will be up dated so that the user interfaces to BIBTEX 1 0 from IATEX and plain TEX are as similar as pos sible e Documentation The BIBTEXing and De signing BIBTEX Styles documents 5 6 cur rently distributed with BIBTEX are neither as widely known nor as complete as they could be For BIBTEX 1 0 the main documentation will be in a book and will be much more thorough Among other things it will include a bib file grammar so that those who are writing tools to manipulate the database files can make their software m
3. has taken BIBTEX into places not anticipated necessitating changes Here are some general goals for BIBTEX 1 0 e Easier nonstandard styles The most frequent requests I see are for new bibliography styles Creating a new bibliography style generally en tails programming in the bst language which for most users is not an easy task Patrick Daly s custom bib makebst package has made it reasonably easy for ordinary user to create new bibliography styles for BIBTEX 1 0 the sit uation will improve even more e More international BIBTEX has spread to the non English speaking world BIBTEX 1 0 will address associated issues e More fields of study The original BIBTEX users were from the technical world of mathematics and computer science The BIBTEX 1 0 stan dard styles will do more to accommodate those in other fields like the humanities e Enhanced sharing capabilities There now ex ist huge bib file bibliographic databases some available to users world wide BIBTEX 1 0 will make the sharing of those databases easier e Better documentation The BIBTEX 1 0 docu mentation will be more extensive e FroZgN For even better stability BIBTEX 1 0 will be frozen As with TEX 3 0 it will be up graded for bug fixes only Some of the features planned for implementing those goals appear in the next section New features Over the years I have accumulated a list of new fea tures and probable changes for BIBTEX 1 0 and its st
4. 4 will be more active than dormant 3 to a Bell Labs Computer Science Colloquium audi ence that included some troff true believers BIBTEX yesterday today and tomorrow But back to 1983 Over the course of the next year and a half I implemented Lamport s basic de sign with a few enhancements The first working version of BIBTEX 0 41 trudged forth in the sum mer of 1984 Lamport wrote and Howard Trickey modified a bibliography style based on Mary Claire van Leunen s suggestions in her Handbook for Schol ars 9 Trickey s modified version was to become btxbst doc the template for BIBTRX s four stan dard styles plain abbrv alpha and unsrt By the way these are called standard styles not be cause they are supposed to be some sort of stan dard but because they are in the standard release of BIBTEX The first public release of BIBTEX in March 1985 was version 0 98 for ATEX version 2 08 Sev eral upgrades including one for A TEX 2 09 followed later that year Version 0 99 which added many new features was released in January 1988 two mi nor upgrades followed the next month but BIBTEX itself has remained unchanged since then The stan dard styles have been unchanged since March 1988 In 1990 Karl Berry wrote some macros for use in his eplain tex package that made BIBTEX us able with plain and other versions of TeX He and I modified the macros and released them as btxmac tex in August 19
5. 90 usable with or with out the eplain package Several upgrades followed the last in March 1995 The current versions are 0 99c for BIBTEX it self 0 99b for btxbst doc the standard styles tem plate file but version 0 99a for each of the four standard styles and 0 99k for btxmac tex That s for the software I ve worked on There has in addition been work that others have done to support BIBTEX especially in the last decade e software for the handling of database bib files my personal database handling preference is the text editor Emacs s BIBTEX mode but I don t recommend that others join the Emacs religion just for that e the amassing of many database files for public consumption minimizing the amount of work it takes to create new entries Nelson Beebe has been particularly prolific in that regard e software for generating new bibliography styles automatically without having to know details of the somewhat arcane bst bibliography style language Patrick Daly s custom bib makebst package has gotten widespread use more on this later That brings us up to date TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 1 Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Meeting 27 Oren Patashnik Goals BIBTEX has been very stable for some time now Software stability is nice it helps others build tools that augment the software As suggested above many tools have grown up around BIBTEX The popularity of IA JT X however
6. BIBIEX yesterday today and tomorrow Oren Patashnik San Diego CA Abstract This paper looks back at the last 20 years of BIBTEX and also looks ahead if not to the next 20 years then at least to BIBTEX 1 0 Introduction BIBTEX is the bibliography program designed origi nally to accompany Leslie Lamport s TEX it now works with other incarnations of TEX too BIBTEX removes the tedium and adds some flexibility in producing a reference list When BIBTEX creates your reference list it s BIBTEX not you minding the minutiae like ensuring that your reference list entries are in the correct order that every comma is in place and that the information is formatted consistently across entries Furthermore a single simple change of bibliography style name lets you convert your reference list from style A which might order the entries alphabetically and spell out jour nal names in full and list all authors as first name then last name to a completely different style B which might order the entries according to their or der of mention in the text and abbreviate journal names and invert just the first author s first and last names This paper is an updated version of a paper 7 from the 1994 TUG meeting in Santa Barbara It gives a history of BIBTEX to the present the gen eral goals for BIBTEX 1 0 which will be the frozen version of BIBTEX just as TEX 3 is the frozen ver sion of TEX some specific new features
7. TeX book cite knuth tex The cite command s argument knuth tex called a cite key must match the corresponding database key A TEX might typeset this cite command as in the TEXbook 41 or in the TgXbook or in the TEXbook Knuth 1984 depending on the citation style ATEX s default ci tation style uses a number in brackets and for that citation style together with an appropriate bibliog raphy style the corresponding reference list entry might look like 41 Donald E Knuth The T Xbook Addison Wesley 1984 Besides the cite commands your IA TEX source file will also have two BIBTpX related commands bibliography mybib bibliographystyle plain TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 1 Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Meeting 25 Oren Patashnik The bibliography command does two things It tells IA TEX to put the reference list at that spot in your document and it tells BIBTEX which file s to use for the bibliographic database here just the sin gle file mybib bib The bibliographystyle com mand tells ATEX nothing but tells BIBTEX which bibliography style to use here the standard style plain bibliography style file names end with bst thus the relevant file is plain bst in this case So with your database file s and your ATEX source file structured appropriately your citations are formatted according to the citation style and your reference list is formatted according to the bi
8. andard styles The list below is certainly not ex haustive but it contains the most important items Each one listed has a high probability of existing in BIBTEX 1 0 e Software for generating customized bibliogra phy style bst files In Santa Barbara I had claimed that there would be a Bibsty program to do that similar in spirit to the processing that creates the four standard styles from the current template file btxbst doc but with lots more options That Bibsty program however would partly duplicate what Patrick Daly has bibliography style customization aux bst bib NL BIBTEX ZN bbl blg Figure 2 BIBTEX 1 0 input and output files done with the custom bib makebst package So he and I have decided to collaborate for BIBTEX 1 0 on a system that will include the options of his current code along with some things planned for the Bibsty program This system will have among other options an eas ily changed symbolic name for each string that a bibliography style outputs to the bbl file directly such as editor or volume making it easier to for example convert bibliography styles from one language to another Figure 2 shows how the new style customization system will fit into the scheme Eight bit input Most current BIBTEX imple mentations can handle 8 bit input BIBTEX 1 0 will guarantee at a minimum to support the character set conventions of TEX 3 In addi tion BIBTEX 1 0 may
9. b liography style To actually produce the typeset document you run JA TEX BIBTEX A TEX EA JTEX The first JA TEX run writes to an aux file information for use by BIBTEX which bibliography style to use which database file s to use and which database entries to include The BIBTEX run reads all that information from the aux file reads the specified database bib file s formats the reference list ac cording to the instructions in the bibliography style bst file and writes its output onto a bbl file The next IA TEX run reads the bb1 file and incor porates the reference list into the document The final IA TEX run fixes the references into the refer ence list Figure 1 shows the files that BIBTEX uses The blg file is BIBTEX s log file in which BIBTEX records any warning or error messages To try using BIBTEX with FTRX put the six line BOOK entry shown on the previous page into a file called mybib bib and then into a file called mypaperi1 tex put these six lines of TEX documentclass article begin document The TeX book cite knuth tex is good bibliography mybib bibliographystyle plain end document Exactly how you run IATRX and BIBTEX is system dependent on my system I issue four commands latex mypaperi bibtex mypaper1 latex mypaperi latex mypaperi To try using BIBTEX with plain TRX create the file mybib bib as above and then put into a file called mypaper2 tex these seven line
10. be able to accommodate Unicode Multiple bibliographies within a single docu ment Many large documents contain several bibliographies one bibliography per chapter for a book or one per paper for a conference proceedings Several solutions have arisen for handling such situations but BIBTEX 1 0 will support multiple bibliographies directly Enhanced sorting The current BIBTEX does well with English but doesn t gracefully han dle certain unusual sorting conventions of other languages like Hungarian BIBTEX 1 0 will have more powerful sorting capabilities for handling them Reference list back pointers BIBTEX 1 0 will provide a direct mechanism for indicating in a reference list entry where in the text that entry was cited This is a useful feature that I sus pect will become widespread now that our new typesetting technology makes it painless 28 TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 1 Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Meeting e An ALTAS command Suppose you have an en try in a database file that uses a different data base key say knuth tex from the cite key you prefer say texbook this might happen for ex ample if that entry is in a shared database file With BIBTEX 1 0 you will be able to keep the cite key and database key as is as long as you put a command like ALIAS texbook knuth tex somewhere in your database e A MODIFY command With BIBTEX 1 0 you will be able to create a slightly altered version of
11. for achiev ing those goals and the plan for releases of BIBTEX leading up to BIBTEX 1 0 Before all that however primarily for those who are unfamiliar with BIBTEX comes a section that explains its rudiments Using BIBTEX To use BIBTEX you ll have your bibliographic in formation in a bibliography database and to make use of that information a few IA JTEX commands sprinkled throughout your IA TEX source file 1 Throughout this paper the term reference list is used generally to refer to what might also be called a bibliography or a list of sources or anything similar 2 The term IA TEX is used to mean either IATRX or plain or other variations of TEX For example in a file mybib bib database file names end with bib you might have an entry like BOOK knuth tex author Donald E Knuth title The TeX book publisher Addison Wesley year 1984 The BOOK tells BIBTEX the entry type The bibli ography style will instruct BIBTEX on how to format a BOOK entry type The knuth tex is the database key which is a sequence of characters to be used as the symbolic name for this entry And the rest of the entry comprises four field field value pairs appropriate for a BOOK entry type In general you will have many such entries in a database file you might also have multiple database files And in your I4 TRX source file you might have a citation like in the
12. ik BIBTRXing General documen tation for BIBTEX users contained in the file btxdoc tex 8 February 1988 Oren Patashnik Designing BIBTEX styles Doc umentation for BIBTEX style designers con tained in the file btxhak tex 8 February 1988 Oren Patashnik BIBTEX 1 0 TUGboat 15 269 273 1994 Unilogic Ltd Pittsburgh Scribe Document Production System User Manual fourth edition April 1984 Chapter 12 and appendices E8 through E10 deal with bibliographies Mary Claire van Leunen A Handbook for Schol ars 1992 Oxford University Press revised edition TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 1 Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Meeting
13. ion in the sources above and describe some of the tools available for helping with BIBTEX BIBTFX s standard bibliography styles like plain are based on Mary Claire van Leunen s A Handbook for Schol ars 9 That book is worthwhile reading for anyone wanting to design a bibliography style from scratch History Leslie Lamport patterned TEX after a document production system called Scribe 8 written by Brian Reid in the late 1970s at Carnegie Mellon Univer sity One of Scribe s basic tenets was that to the extent possible with a computer program writers should be allowed to concentrate on content rather 26 TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 1 Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Meeting than on formatting details Or as Reid so amusingly put it Not everyone should be a typesetter I think of ATRX as a fairly successful Scribification of TEX ATEX is almost as easy to use as Scribe yet almost as powerful as TEX In any case Scribe had become popular in cer tain academic circles and Lamport decided that to make it easy for Scribe users to convert to BTEX he would adopt Scribe s bibliography scheme in TEX But TEX macros alone were insufficient in practice to do all the things like alphabetizing that a bib liography processor needs to do he decided instead to have a separate bibliography program That pro gram would manipulate the bibliographic informa tion in Scribe like database files according to the instructi
14. ons programmed in a special purpose style language The postfix stack based language he had in mind was to be powerful enough to program many different bibliography styles My own work on BIBTEX started in February 1983 Just for the fun of it I went back and dug up the original email 15 Feb 83 0908 To OP SU AI tex82 SRI CSL Oren Leslie Lamport is working on a new macro package for TeX82 and needs someone to write a support program or two We are volunteering you His address is TEX82 SRI CSL Why don t you get in contact with him and see whether his requirements are within the scope of what you re willing to do This was described as a three week project and the first time I gave this talk at Santa Barbara in 1994 I compared the three week project to the three hour tour of the 1960 s American televi sion series Gilligan s Island in which an afternoon s harbor cruise became a shipwreck adventure lasting years Many of us at that TUG conference really did go on a three hour harbor cruise This year s meeting was on the Big Island of Hawaii though and it struck me that there s an even better metaphor for my work on BIBTEX than the Gilligan s Island adventure I started working on BIBTEX it turns out within days of when the current eruptive phase of Kilauea began in early 1983 And a volcano aptly describes my work on BIBTEX a burst of activity followed by a dormant stretch 200
15. ore robust Planned releases 2004 will see the release of an updated version of the btxmac tex macros Probably toward the end of the year will come a bug fix version of BIBTEX 0 99 There are just a handful of actual bugs to BIBTEX itself the most annoying being its mishan dling of URLs which didn t even exist when the cur rent BIBTEX was released There will be several beta releases of BIBTEX and its standard styles leading up to 1 0 eventually one of those beta releases will be declared to be 1 0 and frozen Until BIBTEX 1 0 is finished I will skim the comp text tex newsgroup for BIBT pX related post ings so it suffices to post there anything you think I should see In general that s a good place to post questions about BIBTEX usually someone posts a useful reply Occasionally Pll reply by private email TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 1 Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Meeting 29 Oren Patashnik References 1 lt lt 30 Karl Berry and Oren Patashnik btxmac tex Macros to make BIBTEX work with plain TEX current version 0 99k 13 November 1995 Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach with Jo hannes Braams David Carlisle and Chris Row ley The IATEX Companion Addison Wesley 2nd edition 2004 Helmut Kopka and Patrick W Daly Guide to TEX Addison Wesley fourth edition 2003 Leslie Lamport MTX A Document Prepara tion System Addison Wesley second edition 1994 Oren Patashn
16. s of plain TEX input btxmac The TeX book cite knuth tex is good medskip leftline bf References bibliography mybib aux bst bib a BIBTEX A bbl blg Figure 1 BIBTE X s input and output files bibliographystyle plain bye To run mypaper2 through TEX and BIBTEX tex mypaper2 bibtex mypaper2 tex mypaper2 tex mypaper2 The file btxmac tex which mypaper2 tex inputs contains the macros that make BIBTEX work with plain TeX Those macros are a standard part of most TEX distributions but if they re not a part of yours you ll have to go fetch a copy That s a brief introduction to BIBTEX The fol lowing sources provide further details Leslie Lam port s TFX manual 4 explains how to use BIBTEX with ATEX In particular section B 1 describes the bib file format in detail The file btxmac tex 1 documents its own use with or without Karl Berry s eplain tex package for which the btxmac macros were originally written The BrBTfXing docu ment 5 which is distributed along with BIBTEX itself contains further hints for BIBTEX users The Designing BIBTEX Styles document 6 also dis tributed with BIBTEX explains the postfix stack based language used to write BIBTEX bibliography styles bst files The ATX Companion 2nd edi tion 2 by Michel Goossens Frank Mittelbach et al and Guide to TFX 3 by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W Daly summarize much of the informa t
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