107 lines
5.9 KiB
HTML
107 lines
5.9 KiB
HTML
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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<meta name="Author" content="Patrick H. Madden">
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<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.0.35 i586) [Netscape]">
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<meta name="Description" content="a bib file editor for LaTeX">
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<title>tkbib 1.0</title>
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</head>
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<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="#0000FF" vlink="#FF0000" alink="#000088">
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<center>
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<h3>
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<b>tkbib 1.0: a bib file editor for LaTeX</b></h3></center>
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<center><b>January 20th, 2000</b></center>
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<h3>
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Introduction</h3>
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If you use LaTeX to compose technical papers, you're
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probably familiar with bibtex. The bib files used by bibtex contain
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the citations, and these files can get large, messy, and are not a lot
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of fun to maintain. I was using <i>bibcard</i> a few years ago, but
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without an X11 Motif library, keeping the code running on my various machines
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was a pain. Thus, I put on a pot of coffee and threw together a Tcl/Tk
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based bib file editor. This software is released under the Gnu Public
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License; it comes with no warranty (make backups of your bib files!), and
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you're free to use, modify, and improve it any way you see fit. Send
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any questions or comments to <<a href="mailto:pmadden@cs.binghamton.edu">pmadden@cs.binghamton.edu</a>>.
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Current versions will be maintained at <<a href="http://vlsicad.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/tkbib">http://vlsicad.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/tkbib</a>>;
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you should be able to download directly from <<a href="http://vlsicad.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/tkbib/tkbib.tar.gz">http://vlsicad.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden/tkbib/tkbib.tar.gz</a>>.
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<br> This release is something of a stop-gap; I'll be
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short of time for the next few months, and wanted to get something out
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before I got buried with other work. Thus, there are a lot of rather
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obvious features that have not been implemented.
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<h3>
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Installing tkbib</h3>
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The distribution is a gzipped/tarred directory.
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For UNIX systems, you'll need to get tkbib into your path (a symbolic link
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should work fine), and maybe edit the first line to point to where you
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have <i>wish</i> installed. tkbib can figure out where it has been
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installed, so you don't need to do anything other than get it into your
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path. This is a Tcl/Tk program, and it should run without problems
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on any moderately recent version of the <i>wish</i> interpreter.
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For Windoze based systems, you might have trouble with the file select
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box; I'm not sure if the odd behavior is just with my machine, or with
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all flavors of Windoze. Let me know if you have problems loading
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in a bib file.
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<h3>
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Using tkbib</h3>
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Run tkbib from the command line; under the FILE menu
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item, you can specify a bib file to read in.
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<br> tkbib will open a window listing the citations (in
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alphabetical order by cite key). You can edit an existing citation
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by double-clicking on the key; this will open a second window where all
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the fields may be edited. To save your changes, click <b>update</b>;
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to dismiss without update, click <b>dismiss</b>.
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<br> To create a new record, click the the "new" button
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for the appropriate entry type.
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<br> When loading a bib file, duplicate citation keys
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are discarded (you'll get an error message to this effect). When
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creating a new key, no checking is done, so you're on your own to make
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sure that things stay correct. Parsing of the bib files is very weak:
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each key is expected to be on a line of it's own, and to not span more
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than one line; <font color="#FF0000">if you currently have a large bib
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file, you will probably need to hand-edit it before using tkbib</font>.
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I'm planning on writing a decent lex-and-yacc converter when I have an
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abundance of time.
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<br> Each citation has an "index" field; I'll be
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using this to assign each paper a number, and then will use the number
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to sort the papers physically. My numbering scheme is the last two
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digits of the year, followed by the first four digits of the first page
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of paper. Each citation also has a URL; many people are putting PostScript
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or PDF files for their papers on the web, or have pages detailing the current
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research.
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<br> A search window will look through all citations
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for the string entered. Clicking search will list only the citations
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that match. Filter will list only those that match, and were listed
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by the previous search. Merge will combine those that match with
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the results of the previous search. Some time soon, this will be
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expanded to allow regular expressions, search restricted to keyword fields,
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ranking of matches, etc.
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<br>
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<h3>
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Coming Soon</h3>
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On the agenda are better parsing of bib files, sanity
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checking on cite keys, and a greatly improved search interface. The
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management of citations should be made cleaner (check the code; it's scary!)
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I'm toying around with the idea of setting up a web CGI script to accept
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bib file entries, so that it would be easy to automagically update a monsterously
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large common bib file; let me know if you'd be interested in tkbib having
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a button to "update the Internet".
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<h3>
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Known Bugs</h3>
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The parser is really really weak. Be careful with
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your bib files, and make backup copies of things until you're familiar
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with the program and what it does. There should be better checking
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to make sure you can't duplicate cite keys, but this code hasn't been finished.
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<br> There may be some Windoze problems with the file
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selection box; I'm tracking this down now, to determine if the problem
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is local, or more general. What seems to happen is that after accepting
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a file to read in, the program loses keyboard and mouse focus, and cannot
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regain it.
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<br>
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</body>
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</html>
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