[OS X TeX] plea for help with TeX bibliographic databases: the humanities, and unicode

[Mark Smith]

Roger Hart wrote:

>But bibliographic databases and utilities seem to me to still have 
>considerable limitations. My sense is that they probably work well for 
>the sciences and medicine in English, but not as well for the 
>humanities, which have more complex (or admittedly, arcane, if you 
>prefer) citations and bibliographies, and almost always include several 
>languages.

I'm in biotech/biomedicine, so I'm in no position to talk about bibiliographic requirements in the humanities, but I think the limitations you perceive are, to an extent, bound up in the bibTeX format itself and have somewhat less to do with specific front ends.

There is at least one project to create an alternative. Bruce D'Arcus' XBiblio (and the associated Cite and CiteProc):

        http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/

One caveat with the intended focus for the early development of this project is that for TeX projects, the only envronment which could be made to work with Xbiblio more or less "out of the box" is ConTeXt.

mark.
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