Dear Thierry, I use it:
james$ bibtex --version BibTeX 0.99d (TeX Live 2010/MacPorts 2010_0) kpathsea version 6.0.0 Copyright 2010 Oren Patashnik. ... In my area (roughly theoretical computer science I guess) LaTeX is a necessity (I have to send the LaTeX source to the publisher) and bibTeX is used by most people to manage their own references. Lots of people include bibtex for their papers on their publications webpages to make this easy. This is the only reliable source of bibtex, 'harvested' bibtex produces laughably bad results. However, I often have to remove the bibtex file and inline the references for the camera ready version of the paper. I'd say that bibtex is usually used to manage a library of references that you accumulate over time. It's not a necessity but an important convenience and one whose use is widespread. If you want to work at all you need LaTeX. If you want to work with others you need bibTeX. You could do without it but nobody else is prepared too. Trying to avoid either would be like refusing to use email. When I say you I guess I mean me :) Best wishes and keep up the good work! James On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 12:39 PM, <tlaro...@polynum.com> wrote: > Hello, > > Since I'm finishing the task I have undertaken---provide a complete core > TeX system with MetaPost---, there is one piece that is a WEB program, > hence needs to be translated, and that may be used: bibTeX. > > I don't use it myself but since "third millenium state of the art > academic research" is evaluated by the same algorithm as the one > used by Google to rank pages: number of citations and cross citations, > I guess it is fundamental for an author to be able to cite a maximum > of works he has not read, crediting people that have actually signed > them but not actually written them, keeping in mind that it is not > a problem that none of them has ever grasped the subject since it > doesn't make sense. > > The problem is that the version of bibTeX in the sources I have started > with is 0.99c; it is not rocket science; it seems to me overkill to not > just handle the bibliography with normal text utilities; and it seems > that there are other versions in use now mainly with LaTeX. > > So questions: > > 1) Are there people using it? > 2) What version? > 3) Is there now a non WEB based implementation?---in this case I could > simply forget about it.--- > > I need feedback since my main engineering tool is still /dev/null! > -- > Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> > http://www.kergis.com/ > Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C > >
