[Texmacs-dev] Bibliography

[Bas Spitters]

Hello,

The bibliography is one of the few points in texmacs where the user still have 
to rely on latex-knowledge. This is sometimes difficult for new users (see 
the recent request on texmacs-users). Personally, I sometimes forget the key 
of a bibtex entry in a large database. I can of course retrieve it using 
grep/vim, but I think some more support is sometimes convenient.

I had a short look at this. Here's what I found so far, hoping it might be 
useful for others.
I have used both pybliographer and tkbibtex before at times.
It seems that pybliographer is slightly more developed.
Here's some information from the website:
(http://pybliographer.org)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Pybliographer is a tool for managing bibliographic databases. It can be used 
for searching, editing, reformatting, etc. In fact, it's a simple framework 
that provides easy to use python classes and functions, and therefore can be 
extended to many uses (generating HTML pages according to bibliographic 
searches, etc).

In addition to the scripting environment, a graphical Gnome interface is 
available. It provides powerful editing capabilities, a nice hierarchical 
search mechanism, direct insertion of references into LyX and Kile, direct 
queries on Medline, and more. It currently supports the following file 
formats: BibTeX, ISI, Medline, Ovid, Refer. 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both tkbibtex and pybliographer support the so-called lyx-pipe, which 
communicates via a file.  The pyblink tool copies the information from the 
lyx-pipe to the X-clipboard. It is easy to change this tool so that it 
outputs the texmacs format. Then this combination can be used in the 
following way:

* select a reference in pybliographic. Choose cite from the menu. Then choose 
"paste as texmacs" in texmacs.

This is quite usable.



Possible improvements:
* Make texmacs watch the lyx-pipe at all times. (I did not see how to do this 
using guile extensions).
* Create a complete interface to pybliographer in texmacs.

Please let me know whether there are better solutions. If not, I could write 
some documentation on this if anyone thinks this is useful.

Bas