
This is bp, a Perl Bibliography Package, by Dana Jacobsen (dana@acm.org).

# The bp package is written by Dana Jacobsen (dana@acm.org).
# Copyright 1992-1996 by Dana Jacobsen.
#
# Permission is given to use and distribute this package without charge.
# The author will not be liable for any damage caused by the package, nor
# are any warranties implied.

This software is currently in BETA state.  It works for me, and it seems to
work for the people I've heard from who are using it.  Send me mail if you
have any problems or find it particularly useful.

  It should work under both Perl 4.036 and Perl 5.00[0123].  I have not tested
it with other versions.  The package will let you write programs that handle
bibliography parsing in a generic fashion for multiple bibliography types.
It comes with some sample programs that do typical sorts of processing.  It
also allows conversion between formats and character sets.  It is extendable,
meaning that you can write your own routines, so to recognize your format "foo"
all you have to do is write your "foo" code that reads, writes, and
converts to and from the package's canonical format.  You now have a converter
to and from your format to all other supported formats.  You do not have to
modify the package in any way -- just add that one module.

  This distribution contains:

bin/		Some sample binaries.  I have these installed with the name
		"bib" prepended to them.  I then run "bibsort", etc.

lib/		The package.  Either put these files in your @INC (such as
		/usr/lib/perl, or /usr/lib/perl5), or set your BPHOME
		environment variable to point to wherever you install them
		(I just leave them here).

tests/		Some programs to test the package.  You can run all the
		validation tests with the included tests/Makefile.

ref/		Some standard biblio files in various formats that I'm
		using to test the software.

gen/		The .gen files and the genmod.pl program used to create
		output styles.  genmod.pl turns style.gen into bp-s-style.pl.

misc/		Miscellaneous little scripts.  You can ignore these.

examples/	The examples used in the web page tutorial.


  Support for the following formats is included:

format  read write description
------- ---  ---   ------------------------------------------------------------
bibtex   x    x    BibTeX.
refer    x    x    Refer, including an EndNote option.
tib      x    x    Tib.  Few of the real tib extensions are supported.
rfc1807  x    x    RFC 1807 / 1357 format for Tech Reports.
procite  x    x    ProCite comma-delimited format
text     x    x    Text format.  Handles raw lines or paragraphs.
cstra    x         CS Tech Report format.
ieee     x         IEEE catalog format.  I believe this is outdated.
inspec   x         INSPEC.  The "Doc Type" version.
medline  x         Medline.  The Entrez MEDLARS version.
melvyl   x         Melvyl.
powells  x         An old Powells catalog format.  Obsolete.
output        x    A few styles.  Generic, booklist, aacf.
html          x    HTML.  This is a synonym for output with the HTML charset.
auto     x    x    Currently only recognizes file name suffixes.

  Support for the following character sets is included:

8859-1		ISO 8859-1 8 bit characters.
apple		Apple's mapping of 8bit characters.
html		Hypertext Markup Language.  Currently this is only 2.0.
tex		TeX.  Mostly basic stuff.
troff		UNIX troff.  Basic stuff.
dead		Dead-key.  Things like \'a, \/o, \-D.
none		Strips off all accents.  7bit only.
canon		The format used internally.

  I have some programs that convert some charset descriptions used by
other packages into a form usable by bp, so other charsets can be supported.

Full documentation is available in HTML form from:

       http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/bp/index.html

Send me mail if this is not convenient for you.  I can mail a set out.
--
Dana Jacobsen
dana@acm.org
