[boost] [quickbook] feature request

From: Andrew Sutton (asutton_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-21 08:37:26

All (especially documenters),

I seem to be rewriting much of the Boost.Graph documentation as I  
slowly translate it into quickbook format, and augment it with  
concepts from my SoC project. However, I've run into a "small-ish"  
missing feature in quickbook that I might need to do the job  
correctly: bibliography support. Boost.Graph has a (growing)  
bibliography of about 60 different references.

What I would like to be able to do is something like this...

# somewhere in graph.qbk
[include bibliography.qbk]

The bibliography should contains a set of structured records that  
define bibliographic entries that we can cite in then documentation   
proper. It would probably be worthwhile to support a number of  
different entry types.

# book references
[bibbook
   [authors [Aho, A.V.] [Hopcroft J.E.] [Ullman J.D.]]
   [title Data Structures and Algorithms]
   [year 1983]
   [publisher Addison-Wesley]
]

# journal articles
[bibarticle
   # ...
   [journal [title Software - Practice and Experience] [volume 25]  
[issue 8]]
   [year 1995]
   [date Aug]
   [pages 863-889]
]

# conference proceedings
[bibproceedings
   # ...
   [conference 23rd International Conference on Software Maintenance]
   [location Paris, France]
   [year 2007]
   [date Oct 2-5]
]

There are probably others to support (i.e., theses and  
dissertations). Citations should be easy since they're basically just  
links. A citation might look something like:

[bibref aho_1983_data_structures_and_algorithms]

This could generate something like:

[Aho'1983]

Although there are a number of different represent references. They  
could simply be numbers.

Does this sound like something that might be useful for quickbook? I  
was thinking about trying to write it myself, but I'm a little busy  
between SoC and my narrowing down a dissertation topic. I still might  
give it a shot, but I don't really know anything about the back-end  
formatting.

Thoughts? Comments?

Andrew Sutton
asutton_at_[hidden]