NAME

hxmkbib - create bibliography from a template

SYNOPSIS

hxmkbib [ -s separator ] [ -a auxfile ] [ -n maxauthors ] [ -r moreauthors ] bibfile [ templatefile ]

DESCRIPTION

The hxmkbib commands reads a list of bibliographic keys (labels) from auxfile, finds the corresponding entries in bibfile and creates a bibliography, using templatefile as a model. The auxfile may, e.g., have been created by hxcite(1). It consists of labels, one per line. The bibfile is a refer(1) style database. hxmkbib looks for entries with a %L field equal to a key in the auxfile.

The templatefile consists of three parts:

preamble: The preamble is the part up to the first occurrence of %{. The preamble is copied to the output unchanged, except for occurrences of %. To create a single % in the output, there must be two in the preamble (%%). All other occurrences of % followed by another letter are not copied, but are collected into a string called the "sort order." and use to sort the entries, as explained below.
template: The template starts with %{L: and ends with a matching %}. The text in between is copied as often as there are bibliographic entries in bibfile that correspond to keys in auxfile. Variables in the template are replaced by the corresponding field in the bibliographic entry: all occurrences of %x will be replaced by the field %x of the entry. Parts of the text may be enclosed in %{x: and %}. This means that the text in between should only be output if the current entry has a field x. Text that is enclosed in %{!x: and %} will only be output if the entry does not have a field x. Both kinds of conditional sections may also be nested.
postamble: The text after the %} is copied unchanged to the output, after all bibliographic entries have been processed.

By default bibliographic entries are copied to the output in the order of the keys in auxfile, except that keys that occur more than once are only used once. If the preamble contains occurrences of %x (where x is neither "%" nor "{") then these together determine the sort order. E.g., if the preamble contains %A%D then the entries will be sorted first on field A (author) and then on field D (date).

Here is an example of template file that creates a bibliography in HTML format:

<html>
<title>Bibliography</title>
<!--%A%D sorted on author, then date -->
<dl>
%{L:
<dt id="%L">%{A:%A%}%{!A:%{E:%E%}%{!E:%{Q:%Q%}%{!Q:-%}%}%}</dt>
<dd>%{B:"%T"
  in: %{E:%E (eds)
  %}<cite>%B.</cite>%{V: %V.%}
  %}%{J:"%T"
  in: %{E:%E (eds)
  %}<cite>%J.</cite>%{V: %V.%}%{N: %N.%}%{P: pp. %P.%}
  %}%{!B:%{!J:<cite>%T.</cite>
  %}%}%{I:%I.
  %}%{D:%D.
  %}%{C:%C.
  %}%{R:%R.
  %}%{S:%S.
  %}%{O:%O
  %}%{U:<a href="%U">%U</a>
  %}</dd>
%}
</dl>
</html>

This template starts with four lines of preamble, including the sort string %A%D on line 3. The sort string itself will not be output, but the rest of the comment will.

From the line %{L: to the line %} is the template. E.g., the line that starts with <dt id=... contains a complex conditional text that prints the authors (%A) if there are any, otherwise the editors (%E) if there are any, otherwise the institution that is the author (%Q), if any, and a dash otherwise. Note how the parts are nested, Most of the text is inside %{!A:...%}, meaning that that part will only be effective if there is no author field (%A).

The final two lines are the postamble and will simply be copied unchanged.

A bibliographic entry that looks like this in bibfile:

%L Java
%A Gosling, James
%A Joy, Bill
%A Steele, Guy
%T The Java language specification
%D 1998
%I Addison-Wesley
%U http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/index.html

will be printed by the template above as:

<dt id="Java">Gosling, James; Joy, Bill; Steele, Guy</dt>
<dd><cite>The Java language specification.</cite>
  Addison-Wesley.
  1998.
  <a href="http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/index.html">http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/index.html</a>
  </dd>

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-a auxfile: The file that contains the list of keys (labels) for which bibliographic entries should be printed. If the option is absent, the name of this file is formed from the templatefile argument by removing the last extension and adding .aux. If no templatefile is given, the default auxfile is aux.aux.
-s separator: If there are multiple authors or editors in an entry, their names will be listed with a separator in between. By default the separator is "; " (i.e., a semicolon and a space). With this option the separator can be changed.
-n maxauthors: If there are more than maxauthors authors in an entry, only the first author will be printed and the others will be replaced by the string moreauthors. The default is 3.
-r moreauthors: The string to print if there are more than maxauthors authors. The default is "et al.".

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

bibfile: The name of a bibliographic database must be given. It must be a file in refer(1) format and every entry must have at least a %L field, which is used as key. (Entries without such a field will be ignored.)
templatefile: The name of the input file is optional. If absent, hxmkbib will read the template from stdin.

DIAGNOSTICS

The following exit values are returned:

0: Successful completion.
> 0: An error occurred. Usually this is because a file could not be opened or because the %{ and %} pairs are not properly nested. Very rarely it may also be an out of memory error. Some of the possible error messages:
missing ':' in pattern: hxmkbib found a %{ but the second or third letter after it was not a colon.
no '%{' in template file: The template file is unusable, because it contains no template.
unbalanced %{..%} in pattern: There are more %{ than %}.

BUGS

Sorting is primitive: the program doesn't parse dates or names and simply sorts "Jan 2000" under the letter "J" and "Albert Camus" under the letter "A". For the moment the only work-around is to put names in the bibfile as "Camus, Albert".

The program simply lists all authors or editors. There is no way to generate an "et. al." after the third one. The work-around is to put the "et. al." in the bibfile. Putting commas between the first authors and the word "and" before the final one is also not possible.

The program doesn't try to interpret names of authors or editors and they cannot be reformatted. It is impossible to write a name that is specified as "Sartre, Jean-Paul" in the bibfile as "J. Sartre" or as "Jean-Paul Sartre" in the output.

There is no way to suppress a period after a field if the field already ends with a period. E.g., the template "%{A:A.%}" may generate "A. Person Jr.." if the author is "A. Person Jr." The only option is to either not put periods in the bibfile or not put periods in the template.

Entries in the bibfile can only be used if they have a %L (label) field. The program cannot find entries by searching for keywords, like refer(1).

hxmkbib will replace any ampersands (&) and less-than (<) and greater-than (>) signs that occur in the bibfile by their XML entities & < > on the assumption that the template is HTML/XML. This may not be appropriate for other formats.