{"id":393,"date":"2012-08-16T13:20:22","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T13:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/?p=393"},"modified":"2020-09-22T01:58:50","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T01:58:50","slug":"bibtex-is-not-the-only-solution-apparently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/bibtex-is-not-the-only-solution-apparently\/","title":{"rendered":"Bibtex is not the only solution apparently"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I have been blogging quite a lot about bibtex (see here<\/a>) and how I can parse bibtex files. When I tweeted about my most recent blog post, I received a reply asking whether I had looked at biber <\/a>and, instead of parsing the bibtex file, whether I would be better off parsing the bcf file that biber produces as, if noting else, it is in XML and that will be a lot easier to parse. And, apparently, the names are already split into given name and family name.<\/p>\n

I have had a quick look at biber (and the underlying package biblatex<\/a>). They certainly look impressive but the learning curve<\/em> seems to be quite high. From the VERY quick read, you have to install quite a few packages before it will work. This reminds me of the time I first installed WinEdt<\/a> (a latex system). As an aside, I note that my version of WinEdt<\/a> is 5.5 and the latest release is version 7. I wonder if it is worth upgrading?<\/p>\n

When you install WinEdt<\/a>, you also have to install the Mitex<\/a> system. I remember when I did this a few years ago it was painful (I think it is simplified now) and if you did not do things in the correct order then WinEdt<\/a> failed to work at all. Having said that, WinEdt<\/a> is a great piece of software and it is my program of choice for writing scientific articles in Latex and, of course, Latex uses Bibtex and it all works.<\/p>\n

If I install biblatex<\/a>\/biber <\/a>will this work with all style files, class files etc. that are supplied by academic publishers or will I forever be trying to work around<\/em> the system? Indeed, is it possible to use bibtex, and just use the new system when you want?<\/p>\n

Maybe it will all work seamlessly (and I know that I should look at the documentation, but there is quite\u00a0 a lot of it) but I have been caught too many times where you do a quick<\/em> install and then you are trying to get things to work for hours, if not days. I am not saying that biblatex<\/a>\/biber<\/a> fall into this category, but I need to be sure that installing this system gives me benefits above and beyond which I already have.<\/p>\n

As I have reported on previous posts<\/a> I now just about have the parsing of names sorted out. However, I do know that I am just about to face problems with strange<\/em> characters which are usually as a result of mathematical symbols or accent on names. If a new package is able to deal with those, so I don’t have to edit the file manually, or write yet another parser, then it might be worth installing.<\/p>\n

But is it worth installing, just to find out? I’m not sure yet. I need to do some more digging around.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I have been blogging quite a lot about bibtex (see here) and how I can parse bibtex files. When I tweeted about my most recent blog post, I received a reply asking whether I had looked at biber and, instead of parsing the bibtex file, whether I would be better off parsing the bcf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,87],"tags":[108,109,116,107],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-bibtex","tag-biber","tag-biblatex","tag-mitex","tag-winedt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1661,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}