2009/1/12 Alan G Isaac
This would really involve the following. Create a searchable database of citations and an interface for adding to it. Unique keys would be generated by your algorithm of choice when an entry is added. Authors would be asked to use only references in the database.
Desirable for a book. Desirable for documentation?
In documentation, you want the reference to appear in the docstring itself. Our docstrings double as the content of a book, which is why it may be easier to extract the bibliography from the docstrings, rather than populating the docstrings from a central bibliography.
Numerical keys will clearly *not* be consistent. The same key will refer to different citations on different pages, and key width will not be uniform.
We automatically renumber the citations to take care of this.
In additional, numerical keys are not informative when encountered by the reader. I would prefer [last1.last2-2009-sja]_ where sja is "standard journal abbreviation" and last names are ASCII (e.g., ø -> o).
I agree.
But to answer your question, bibstuff includes biblabel.py, which can produce keys for a bibtex database (styled as you like). The problem of setting up the data base remains.
We can add an interface to the documentation editor, where a person pastes the BiBTeX reference, and it returns the appropriate key to use in the docs. Mabe you can think of a more intuitive interface, even. As long as we have a consistent way of generating keys, I'd gladly use them. Regards Stéfan