BIBSORT 1 "08 October 1999" "Version 0.14" [section 5 of 11]

BIBTEX FILE PARTS

1.

Introductory material such as comments, file headers, and edit logs that are ignored by BibTeX. No line in this part begins with an at-sign, ``@''.

2.

Preamble material delineated by ``@Preamble{'' and a matching closing ``}'', intended to be processed by TeX. Normally, there is only one such entry in a bibliography file, although BibTeX, and bibsort, permit more than one.

3.

Macro definitions (abbreviations) of the form ``@String{...}''. Any single @String specification may span multiple lines, and there are usually several such definitions.

4.

Bibliography entries such as ``@Article{...}'', ``@Book{...}'', ``@InProceedings{...}'', and so on, provided that their citation labels have not already been encountered in a crossref assignment in a preceding entry. For bibsort, any line that begins with an ``@'' followed by letters and digits and an open brace is considered to be such an entry. Optional spaces and tabs may surround the ``@'', and precede the first open brace; these spaces and tabs will be deleted from the output to help standardize the appearance.

5.

``@Proceedings{...}'' bibliography entries, which are likely to be cross-referenced by ``@InProceedings{...}'' entries, and any other bibliography entries for which a crossref assignment was met before the entry itself.

An unfortunate implementation limitation of the current BibTeX requires cross-referenced entries to appear after all other entries that cross-reference them, although this limitation works to the advantage of bibsort, allowing single-pass processing.

The order of these parts is preserved in the output stream. Part 1 will be unchanged, but parts 2--5 will be sorted within themselves.

The sort key of ``@Preamble'' entries is their initial line, of ``@String'' entries, the abbreviation name. For all other BibTeX entries, the sort key is citation label between the open curly brace and the trailing comma, unless the sort key is prefixed with additional fields as requested by -byvolume or -byyear options.

bibsort will correctly handle UNIX files with LF line terminators, as well as IBM PC DOS files with CR LF line terminators; the essential requirement is that input lines be delineated by LF characters. Thus, files from the Apple Macintosh, which uses bare CR to terminate lines, would first have to be converted to UNIX or PC DOS line format before giving them to bibsort.