[225] in Athena Bugs
bug in scribe bibliography facility
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Harrington)
Tue Apr 19 02:26:28 1988
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 88 02:25:43 AST
From: Joe Harrington <jh@SOL.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
I started this one in olc, since that was what I should have done with
earlier scribe "bugs". Olc people said it was bona fide.
Briefly, when you define your own Scribe bibliography format, you get
a choice of citation styles. One of these is a roll-your-own. This
option says you get to use "your own key" in deciding what the
citation in the text should look like. Unfortunately it doesn't use
the Key definition, as it should according to the documentation, it
uses the internal text codeword, which should be mnemonic. This is
clearly wrong, and I cannot find a database file where theis is
defined, so I assume it is in the Scribe binary.
Read on...
--jh--
Log initiated for user Joseph Harrington (jh@SOL.MIT.EDU)
(88/04/19 00:25:41)
Topic: scribe
Question:
I'm defining my own bibliography format, because none of the formats available
come close to that used by the astronomy journal Icarus, in which I wish to
publish my thesis. Icarus uses a citation format which looks like (Author 1988)
and this is not one of the defined options for the citation style parameter.
There is, however, an option which says you may use "your own key". In
practice, scribe uses not the "Key" field, but the codeword which is for
internal use only. Using this field will mean I will have to go through the
entire document and change the nice, mnemonic codewords to the difficult
citation keys. Has Scribe or someone else fixed this bug? The appropriate
manual references are: DBA guide section 7 page 7-9.
--jh--
--- 88/04/19 00:25:44 Connected to volunteer Ilhamuddin Ahmed (ilham@M66-080-3.M
IT.EDU)
--- 88/04/19 00:27:34 Message from volunteer ilham@M66-080-3.MIT.EDU:
Hi,
Sorry but this is beyond me. I will forward your question for the next
available consult. Thanks for using OLC and Bye.
- Ilham
--- 88/04/19 00:27:59 Question forwarded by ilham
--- 88/04/19 00:38:48 Connected to volunteer John F Carr (jfc@M16-034-8.MIT.EDU)
--- 88/04/19 00:42:55 Message from volunteer jfc@M16-034-8.MIT.EDU:
Are you rewriting the bibliograaphy library file?
If not, that seems to be the thing to do. While doing that, you can
probably define a form which produces the right results for your input
format.
Bldg 16 doesn't have Scribe manuals, so I can't check the reference.
--- 88/04/19 01:00:15 Message from user jh@SOL.MIT.EDU:
Yes, I thought that was clear. I am making my own reference format. No, you
cannot define your own citation style beyond the few paltry options given
on page 7-9 of the DBA guide. It gives you options for whether you want
parens, brackets, braces, etc. around your citation, whether you want numeric
or alphabetic citations, whether you want superscript or in text citations,
but when it actually comes to what the citation looks like, it gives you
four common options and a "define-your-own". The define-your-own option
uses the WRONG KEYWORD. The DBA guide says on page 7-9 that it uses "your own
key", but it doesn't use the Key field of the bibliography database file, it
uses the internal reference codeword. This makes things quite difficult
if you want some sort of mnemonic to refer to your bibliography entries as, and
providing the capability for a mnemonic reference is part of what the
bibliography mechanism is supposed to do. If someone has not found a solution
outside the April '85 Scribe DBA guide, I think this one goes to bugs@athena.
--jh--
--- 88/04/19 01:05:40 Message from volunteer jfc@M16-034-8.MIT.EDU:
That's what I thought, wanted to be sure.
I couldn't find anything in the consult or fixes lockers. I guess this
is (another) bug with scribe. (It's being relatively nice to you: it
dumped core on me when I tried to make tables.)
Do you want to send it to bugs, or shall I?
--- 88/04/19 01:10:37 Message from user jh@SOL.MIT.EDU:
I'll do it. THanks for the help...
--jh--
