[OS X TeX] Beginner: bibliography strategy?

[Maarten Sneep]

On 9 apr 2005, at 22:36, Martin Wehlou wrote:

> So, I do have BBEdit, but nothing forces me to use it for TeX, so I
> won't. I downloaded TeXShop and it seems much more suitable for editing
> TeX than BBEdit (which I'll use for a lot of other things anyway).

BBEdit is a very capable TeX editor, you just need some glue. Luckily
BBEdit is very easy to glue with AppleScript:
     http://www.nat.vu.nl/~sneep/tex/
(and all keyboard shortcuts you know and love will work as before).

> I also installed Bibdesk and it looks great. The drag-and-drop is
> perfect. EndNote: bye-bye. I'm using a trial version, so there's no
> money lost on it.

BBEdit supports services, so BibDesk integration should be easy.

> So far so good. But I have another question, namely, what about the
> "thebibliography" section? I assume there's a way to make Bibdesk
> automatically add the references used with "\cite" as a "\bibitem" in
> the bibliography section at the end of the document. Or is there 
> another
> way of working that I missed?

I think so: BibDesk manages a .bib bibliobraphic database for you. All 
you
need to do is \cite{} references, and include both a bibliographic 
style, and
point to the database file(s). You then need to run latex (once), 
bibtex (once,
this will create a file with a "thebibliography" bit and all entries 
you used) and
then to resolve all references completely you'll need to run latex 
(twice, the
first time latex will read the .bbl file created by bibtex, the second 
time it will
know all the references).

The running of bibtex can be done from TeXShop (one of the default popup
menus in the toolbar), or through my scripts from BBEdit.

This calls for a minimal sample (all files are available on your 
machine,
bibtex will find the database):

%% start
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
%% see http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yes for 
further details
%% other standard options: abbrv, alpha, unsrt
some text \cite{article-full,article-crossref} some more text 
\cite{phdthesis-full}

\bibliography{xampl}
\end{document}
%% end

Hope this helps,

Maarten

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