Re: BibTex-based bibliographies in FrameMaker

[Fred Ma <fma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

It took a long time to get to this point, so I hope I'm saving someone
some time by posting this (though it pales before contributions from
the people who wrote/modified the actual scripts).

BibFrame is the only package I found that will works on multi-file
books on both solaris and Windows.

   Solaris version, last maintained by Ethan Miller:
   http://www.csee.umbc.edu/pub/elm/ftparchive.html

   Windows modification by Konstantin Laufer:
   http://www.math.luc.edu/~laufer/BibFrame

For the windows modification, you can use the test input files from
the windows-only version:

   http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/Downloads/BIBFRAME_4_WINDOWS/index_e.html

BIBFRAME_4_WINDOWS is more complete in that than Konstantin's
modification because it creates new output MIF files that have updated
values for the citation variables, but it requires that you put the
input MIF files in a specific folder.  That's not necessarily a bad
thing; I just haven't developed a document processing flow around this
yet.

I use Konstantin's because it is "cross-platform".  On the odd
occassion in which I use windows, I run it in the cygwin environment,
which includes perl.  Therefore, the modifications for windows-type
file naming conventions are not necessary, and had to be undone to
resemble's Ethan's version.  For the same reason, the *.bat wrapper
scripts are also unnecessary.

In my opinion, it is not possible to get Konstantin's modification
running without reading about how bibframe works.  This documentation
is obtained from Ethan's version, as are some style files required in
generating the bibliography.  It's obvious how to specify the location
of these files from the user-customizable part of bibframe.pl.  (There
are also other ways to specify parameters for bibframe).

Konstantin's version works on MIF files.  Aside from file-naming
conventions, windows modifications include some removal of stuff that
can't be realized using FM on windows.  Without having looked at it in
detail, this includes all the keyboard macros to ease the definition
of a variable for each citation.  As well, I haven't found a way to
automatically update the variable definitions in the input MIF files
 after the bibliography is generated.

To manually update the variable definitions, each MIF file is loaded
into FrameMaker.  For each file, I import the variable definitions in
the *.var.MIF file generated by BibFrame.  This file contains the
updated values of the citation variables.

I made a small typographic change in bibframe.pl in order for refDirs
to be properly picked up from ~/.bibframerc.  I changed "if ($#refdirs
== 0)" to "if ($#refdirs < 0)".  The reason is because $#refdirs==0
means there is one directory in refdirs, but that statement is meant
to look for an emtpy @refdirs.

I haven't figured out the role played by genbib.pl in Konstantin's
version.

Fred

P.S.  Sent to comp.text.frame, framers@xxxxxxxxx, and
adobe.framemaker.
-- 
Fred Ma
Dept. of Electronics, Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1S 5B6

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