# bib2html demo

bib2html is a combination of a shell script and two BibTeX-style files. bib2html takes the name of a style and a list of .bib file names, and runs BibTeX to produce an output file bib.html. This demo page assumes that you have run either `bib2html alpha demo.bib` or `bib2html abstract demo.bib,` and that the output bib.html remains in the same directory as this file. (Note: the abstracting style will often produce some warning messages from bibtex if the abstracts or comments are too long, but the resulting HTML is still usable.)

One of the neat things about bib2html is that you can put a URL field in your bib entries, and that URL will be used to make the entry's label into a Web link. Usually, the URL would point to the paper itself (e.g., compressed postscript in an ftp archive, or perhaps even an HTML-format paper), but it could of course point to anything. Thus you can expand your idea of what bib entries might reference....

One of the other neat things about bib2html is that you can put citations to the bibliography in other pages, much like you can in LaTeX. The difference is that the citations are links to the bibliography page. For example, I can refer one of my recent papers in the demo bibliography [KC94b]. (View the source of this page to see how it's done). That one has the paper's text on-line. My PhD thesis is [Kot91]. Another paper does not have any on-line version [KE89].

Notice that I use the cite key for the anchor label, rather than the label chosen by BibTeX. This has two main benefits: it makes the citation (URL) more like that in LaTeX, and it makes the citation independent of the format of the bibliography page (and the way it chooses labels).

One disadvantage is that there is no way to automatically generate the citation labels at the point of reference, like BibTeX's cross-referencing capability. Another disadvantage is that bib2html doesn't understand arbitrary LaTeX commands. Although it converts most accents, \bf, \em, etc to HTML, any fancier embedded LaTeX or TeX commands are just passed through. If you need a pretty bibliography, you'll have to edit those by hand.

bib2html source.

-- David Kotz