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Date:         Tue, 8 Dec 92 11:18:31 +0100
From: David_Rhead@VME.CCC.NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
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Subject:      LaTeX 3 and bibliographic software: Papyrus
Status: R


I've had the following interested response from a PAPYRUS person.  I'll
send him a bit of mail responding to his queries as best I can.

                                                                David Rhead
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Subject:  Re: LaTeX 3 and PAPYRUS
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Date:     08 Dec 92 08:53 GMT
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David --

Well, rest assured that Research Software Design is eager to work with you guys
in ensuring the best possible connections between LaTeX and PAPYRUS. A few
random questions and reactions:

1) My limited experience with Internet discussion lists (I'm subscribed to
three or four right now) suggests that in order to subscribe to one I must send
the SUB LATEX-L message to a *particular* listserver. Have I been confused all
this time??? Or is there indeed a particular listserver where I sign up for the
LATEX-L discussion?


2) It sounds like the major area of concern that you've identified so far is
that of included subfiles. Is this a feature that most LaTeX users frequently
use? Can you give me an example? In the proprietary word processor world this
is currently mainly used for inserting graphics. (Although now that Microsoft
Word provides some decent inserting/embedding metaphors, things may change.)

If the only significant use of include files is to make one root file for a
book that /includes all of its chapters, then we already have a work-around for
handling this with PAPYRUS. (You have PAPYRUS run through each of the chapters
once, to build up the master bibliography, and then you run through them each
again to insert the citations into the text.)

Tracing down included file trees would not be difficult for us to do, in
principle, if it would actually be of significant utility. In practice it could
get a bit snarly, though, so I'd rather be convinced of its usefulness before
offering you any promises!


3) My understanding of LaTeX is that it is a "mark-up" specification
independent of the actual text editing software in use. Unless this has
changed, and there is now a *program* named LaTeX or something, then there are
limits to how you could design an "interface" that would work to connect all
text editors to all bibliographic programs. When you say "Perhaps a command
xxxx could be defined such that...", I don't understand who is the recipient of
this command: the text editor? the bibliographic program? the operating system?

If you are simply talking about a shell command, then you might as well just
launch the bibliographic program and point it at the LaTeX file. You'll have to
provide additional parameters anyway (bibliographic style, mainly), and for now
these are very specific for each bibliographic program.


4) PAPYRUS can be instructed to spit out a pretty good imitation of a BibTeX
file. So right now you can use PAPYRUS to suck in references from a CD-ROM and
turn them into BibTeX. (PAPYRUS can also import BibTeX files.)


5) At the moment, all of us proprietary guys are running on DOS and/or
Macintosh platforms. (A couple of us also do VAX-VMS.) I'm not aware of any
notable proprietary bibliographic software for UNIX (though some of my
colleagues may be working on that). My impression is that TeX systems, though
available for DOS and Macs, mainly exist on UNIX platforms.

So although I am eager to get on with this discussion, how relevant will it be?
Are UNIX folks going to be willing to pay money for software? Are PC and Mac
owners going to switch to LaTeX-based word processors?


All of the above are off the top of my head. I hope that I'm not coming across
too negative here, as I am personally excited about the prospect of improving
the linkages between word processing systems and bibliographic database
systems. So while I await further hints about signing up to LATEX-L, I'd like
to offer the above as my first contribution to the discussion. Feel free to
post it to LATEX-L if you think that would be appropriate, and please forward
me copies of any responses.


-- Dave Goldman
   Research Software Design