Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!wjh12!dow
From: dow@wjh12.harvard.edu (Dominik Wujastyk)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: BIBTeX
Message-ID: <212@wjh12.harvard.edu>
Date: 11 May 88 19:39:21 GMT
References: <2268@ut-emx.UUCP>
Reply-To: dow@wjh12.UUCP (Dominik Wujastyk)
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Lines: 48

In article <2268@ut-emx.UUCP> chpf127@ut-emx.UUCP (J. Eaton) writes:
>
>  Does anyone out there know of or have an interactive program which will
>  help me create .bib files for BIBTeX?  Ideally, this program would prompt
>  me for the type of entry (i.e. Journal, Book, etc.) and then let me
>  enter the information for the different fields.  It would also remind
>  me which fields were required, optional or ignored for each type
>  of entry.  Extra bonus features would be checking to see that the
>  key I've chosen is unique, and whether the entry already exists.
>
Pro-Cite by Personal Bibliographic Software, Inc., does everything you
want, and a great deal more.  It can even hunt through an article,
recognize references, and construct a bibliography for you, much as BibTeX
does, but working only from the unflagged citations in the text.  In fact,
it does a lot of the jobs that Bibtex does, and in a smoother, more
integrated manner (no offence to BTX).  You have complete control of the
format of the output, including conditionally inserted codes, so you can
have ProCite output a bibliography all ready formatted for digestion by
TeX.  I have done this with great success. It really is excellent.  

For publicity blurb contact:
Pers. Bibl. Software, Inc.,
412 Longshore Drive,
Ann Arbor,
Michigan 48105.
Phone: (313) 996 1580.
ProCite gets a useful write-up in John J. Hughes's excellent survey of text
applications, _Bits Bytes & Biblical Studies_ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1987).  Hughes praises ProCite as "the most complex, powerful, and flexible
of the bibliographical programs.  It is best suited for professionals and
others with 'serious' bibliographical needs."

The only problem is that ProCite is expensive.  $395.  And they keep
upgrading and charging $50 each time.   Scandalous.  But the product as it
is now, at version 1.4, is heavily feature-laden, and has arrived at some
sort of plateau, I feel.

You might also look at the new Buttonware product, PC-File plus, version
2.0.  The fields are now big enough to take a reasonable amount of text
data, and I think it can recognize duplicates.  Shareware.  $69.

Dominik

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