bibliography support

[Joel de Guzman]

All (especially documenters),

I seem to be rewriting much of the Boost.Graph documentation as I slowly translate it into quickbook format, and augment it with concepts from my SoC project. However, I've run into a "small-ish" missing feature in quickbook that I might need to do the job correctly: bibliography support. Boost.Graph has a (growing) bibliography of about 60 different references.

What I would like to be able to do is something like this...

# somewhere in graph.qbk [include bibliography.qbk]

The bibliography should contains a set of structured records that define bibliographic entries that we can cite in then documentation proper. It would probably be worthwhile to support a number of different entry types.

# book references [bibbook

[authors [Aho, A.V.] [Hopcroft J.E.] [Ullman J.D.]] [title Data Structures and Algorithms] [year 1983] [publisher Addison-Wesley]

]

# journal articles [bibarticle

# ... [journal [title Software - Practice and Experience] [volume 25]

[issue 8]]

[year 1995] [date Aug] [pages 863-889]

]

# conference proceedings [bibproceedings

# ... [conference 23rd International Conference on Software Maintenance] [location Paris, France] [year 2007] [date Oct 2-5]

]

There are probably others to support (i.e., theses and dissertations). Citations should be easy since they're basically just links. A citation might look something like:

[bibref aho_1983_data_structures_and_algorithms]

This could generate something like:

[<a href="...#...">Aho'1983</a>]

Although there are a number of different represent references. They could simply be numbers.

Does this sound like something that might be useful for quickbook? I was thinking about trying to write it myself, but I'm a little busy between SoC and my narrowing down a dissertation topic. I still might give it a shot, but I don't really know anything about the back-end formatting.

Thoughts? Comments?

Andrew Sutton asutton@…