To use Tralics' bib entries or not?
Document Actions
Tralics generates its own XML markup for bibliography entries. In our current XSLT to CNXML, this turns into an ordered list. We'd like to generate bibTeXML instead, as Connexions is capable of supporting this in a <bibliography></bibliography> section after </content> in a .cnxml file. Using bibTeXML makes sense in that, if you believe in semantic XML, you should believe that preserving the semantics from the original .bib file is a good thing to do. Also, when you cite the reference via a singleton <cnxn/> tag, the online display pipeline does the right thing and renders it as the number of the reference in the <bibliography></bibliography> section. The print pipeline doesn't handle this right yet, but there's a Trac bug on this, so hopefully bibtexml will flow smoothly to print as well.
Now, Tralics' bib XML is not exactly bibTeXML, and its tags are in French, so it'll take a bit of work to add that to the XSLT to generate bibTeXML instead of the ordered list we're doing right now. Since there are some tools to generate bibTeXML from .bib files, I looked into what it would take to use those instead and try to splice the output in with that of Tralics in place of Tralics' own bibliography markup. The tool with the most traction seems to be the BibTeXConverter from the bibTeXML folks themselves. From playing around with it, I don't think this is the path we want to to with the LaTeX importer. The bibTeX it generated would not validate using strict rules (even with the tool's internal validator), so it would likely require XSLT cleanup to get it into a format Connexions' validator will like. As an example of the problems I encountered, when there are multiple authors present, multiple <author> </author> tagsets are generated, which is apparently not strictly valid. As another, the ordering of tags within entries, and the naming of some tags such as <volume>, are not compliant with the validator.
Thus, since it looks like an XSLT from the output of the tool would be necessary anyway to get the bibTeXML to validate, and since splicing in the tool's output with Tralics' output would require a good deal of work, it seems like the best plan is to stick with Tralics and write an XSLT to take it's bibliographic XML to bibTeXML.
BibTeX entries in LaTeX may not have all of the fields required by the BibTeXML DTD. Our solution was to create empty BibTeXML tags, in order to validate against the BibTeXML DTD.
BibTeXML entries are straight text, while BibTeX in addition supports Math and Hyperlinks. Most BibTeX entries are straight text, but some LaTeX super users found ways around this. Our solution is to ignore the Math in BibTeX entries and to generate only the URL (as straight text) for Hyperlinks.