Chapter 13. Tools for reference and notes management

Table of Contents

Tools
refdbc
Synopsis
Description
Options
Diagnostics
Configuration
Commands
addlink
addnote
addref
deletelink
deletenote
deleteref
dumpref
getau, geted, getas
getjo, getjf, getj1, getj2
getkw
getnote
getref
help, ?
listdb
liststyle
pickref
selectdb
set
updatejo
updatenote
updateref
verbose
whichdb
Files
See also
Author
bib2ris
Synopsis
Description
Options
Diagnostics
Configuration
Data Processing
Files
See also
Author
db2ris
Synopsis
Description
Options
Configuration
Data Processing
Modifying db2ris
Files
See also
Author
en2ris
Synopsis
Description
Options
Configuration
Data Processing
Files
See also
Author
marc2ris
Synopsis
Description
Options
Configuration
Data Processing
Files
See also
Author
med2ris
Synopsis
Description
Options
Configuration
Data Processing
Files
See also
Author
refdb_dos2unix
Synopsis
Description
See also
Author
refdb_latex2utf8txt
Synopsis
Description
Diagnostics
Data Processing
See also
Author
Reference data output formats
scrn
html
xhtml
ris
risx
bibtex
db31
db31x
teix
Extended notes output formats
scrn
html
xhtml
xnote
The query language
The reference query language
The notes query language
Some example queries
Regular expressions
Unix-style regular expressions
SQL regular expressions

The following tasks can be performed with the tools described in this chapter:

We'll first introduce the command-line client refdbc, RefDB's own multi-purpose reference and notes management client, along with the reference data converters that you can use along with it. The following sections explain the input and output data formats as well as the query language used by RefDB.

Tools

The first subsection explains the usage of the command-line client refdbc.

Whenever you have an electronic source for reference data, you should use these instead of typing datasets from scratch. Reference data come in a variety of formats. Therefore refdb ships with a few conversion utilities which are discussed in this chapter. These utilities create tagged RIS data from the input data.

Since version 0.9.3, refdb supports risx as an additional native input format. You can employ the standard techniques of SGML and XML transformations, i.e. by running DSSSL or XSLT scripts with a suitable engine, to turn bibliographic data encoded as SGML or XML documents into risx.

Remember that refdb accepts only four character encodings for XML input data: UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, and US-ASCII. If your input data use a different character encoding, please use the command-line utility iconv (usually part of the libiconv package) to convert your data to one of the existing character encodings. Do not forget to specify the character encoding in the processing instructions of the input file, otherwise refdb will assume the data are encoded as UTF-8.