Re: [Groff] "Bib" preprocessor?

[Dan Plassche]

On Jul 27, 2016 12:02 PM, "John Gardner" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> A program called *bib* appears to exist (or have once existed) that was
> supposedly similar or identical to *refer*. However, aside from a few
> fleeting references to its existence on Wikipedia
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff#Preprocessors> and Troff.org
> <http://www.troff.org/prog.html>, I'm finding very little info on the
> program.
>
> Does anybody know how it differed from the more familiar *refer* program
> that's bundled with the GNU suite?
>

Timothy Budd wrote bib, which is more flexible than refer in letting you
setup styles for citations and adding multiple references inline under a
single note.

The program was distributed with BSD; you can get a copy from the CSRG
archives and there's documentation in the User's Supplementary Documents
number 28.  MirBSD has an html version of the doc at
https://www.mirbsd.org/htman/i386/manUSD/28.bib.htm.

I tried and liked bib, but found it was easier in my case to manually
format references.  I used Chicago style exclusively abd just setup a sed
script to handle first references, while leaving others as the author's
last name and page number.

Best regards,

Dan Plassche