4.0627 Misc: Homemade Biblio SW; WP Crashes (2/56)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 23 Oct 90 23:21:53 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0627. Tuesday, 23 Oct 1990.
(1) Date: Fri, 19 Oct 90 11:11 EST (41 lines)
From: <BURT@BRANDEIS>
Subject: homemade bibliography software
(2) Date: 19 Oct 90 13:04:34 EST (15 lines)
From: James O'Donnell <JODONNEL@PENNSAS>
Subject: WP crashes
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 90 11:11 EST
From: <BURT@BRANDEIS>
Subject: homemade bibliography software
There's no need to pay anybody money for bibliography formatting
software if you have a wordprocessor that does mailmerging.All such
software is doing is using the mailmerge features of your software in
a relatively straightforward way. To do the same, consider your
bibliography to be something like a form letter, with an "address list"
and a "letter form" just as in mailmerging. Let your address list be
your database of bibliographic information, and let your letter form
be a template for a bibliographic entry. (You can even use the sort
features included in most advanced wordprocessors to keep your citations
in order.)
If you use a text formatter rather than a wordprocessor, you can format
bibliographies using the commands for string replacement and insertion of
external files. Your main file would consist of consist of lots of
entries looking like this (the example is in roff4, but other formatters
will do the same thing):
.ds /AUTHOR/Dickens, Charles?
.ds /TITLE/A Tale of Two Cities/
.ds /DATE/1990/ (that's supposed to be a slash, two lines up)
.so book.rno
What that entry does is define substitutions for the strings AUTHOR
TITLE and DATE, and then calls "book.rno," a file with a template for
bibliographic entries for books. That file might look something like
this:
/AUTHOR/ . /TITLE/ .
( /CITY/ : /PUBLISHER/ , /DATE/)
This is quick and dirty. And it won't do one of the nice things programs
like ProTem's Bibliography do--extract just the things you happen to
cite from a big bibliographic database and construct a little
bibliography just for the text at hand--but it will do in a pinch.
John Burt
Brandeis University
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------19----
Date: 19 Oct 90 13:04:34 EST
From: James O'Donnell <JODONNEL@PENNSAS>
Subject: WP crashes
Tzvee Zahavy's query, incidental to discussing WP footnote searches,
about the vulnerability of WP 5.0 and higher on large files is
well-grounded. WP 5.0 is a memory hog, pushing up around 500K of space
and of course not addressing efficiently anything beyond 640, and as
file size approaches available RAM space, things begin to slow down
dramatically and other problems will arise. WP help line operators tell
me that this is now the major problem that WP programmers are trying to
address for future versions. It's *always* a good idea to save the
current version of a file before trying to do anything even slightly
fancy; and if doing something *very* fancy, to try it on a small sample
file first, then proceed with caution.