[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 12:20:17PM +1200, John Rankin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 13 September 2006 5:59 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> >On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 10:53:30AM +0200, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
> >> As an aside, maybe what we really want isn't (:bibliography:), but 
> >> something like (:bibliography-for-pages :) that accepts any parameters 
> >> that (:pagelist:) does, and uses these to find the pages that should be 
> >> included in the bibliography. 
> >
> >Somehow I think it ought to be
> >
> >    (:pagelist fmt=bibliography ... :)
> >
> >which lets you build a bibliography based on any pagelist
> >selection criteria desired.
> >
> I'd like to reserve judgement on this and first record the
> requirements then look at markup options. I am suffering
> information overload at the moment.

Makes sense.  FWIW, here are some (counter-)reactions...

> My initial reaction is that having a separate directive has
> a number of advantages:
> - it applies only to wiki pages in bibtex format

I think this can be true for (:pagelist:) as well.

> - I don't yet know whether we need to generate a bibliography
>   from multiple wiki pages, or whether we should generate it
>   from a single page and use (:include:) to build a bib
>   from multiple sources if needed

(:pagelist:) can handle either case.

> - having (:cite:) and (:bibtex:) pair highlights their
>   inter-dependence to casual authors, rather than perhaps
>   overloading (:pagelist:) with options that only apply 
>   when used in conjunction with (:cite:)
> - I think I'll need to re-interpret (:bibtex:) when
>   outputting raw LaTeX so that we generate a bib file

Both of these items make a huge amount of sense to me, and definitely
argue for a separate directive.

It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to make direct
use of the pagelist functions without calling it "(:pagelist:)".
The (:searchresults:) directive does this, for example.  So, it's
not at all hard to have a markup rule that converts

    (:bibtex ...options...:)

into

    (:pagelist fmt=bibliography ...options...:)

and then let the built-in pagelist routines handle the rest.

Pm