hxmkbib1

Usage

Overview

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 %}.