BIBINDEX

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 03 October 1992
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NAME

bibindex - create a bibliography index file for biblook(1)

SYNOPSIS

bibindex basename [[-i] word] [[-i] word] ...

DESCRIPTION

bibindex creates a compact binary index file from a BibTeX bibliography file to permit fast lookup by biblook(1). The basename argument can optionally omit the .bib extension. The output index file will be named with the same basename, and extension .bix.

For indexing purposes, a word is any contiguous set of letters and numbers, after the following steps:

1.: Letters are folded to lower case. Thus, "Voronoi" is returned as "voronoi"
2.: All TeX commands, except those in math expressions, are removed, but their arguments are left behind. Thus, "Erd{\H o}ss" is returned as "erdos".
3.: All other non-word characters are removed. Non-word characters inside {{possibly} nested} braces or dollar signs do not delimit words, so they may cause unexpected results. Thus, "{this example}" is returned as "thisexample".
4.: TeX commands in math expressions are considered normal text. Thus, "$O(n\log^2 n)$" is returned as "onlog2n" instead of "onn". This occasionally gives unexpected or unreadable results. For example, "$\bigcup_1^n[a_i,b_i]$" is returned as "bigcup1naibi".
5.: Apostrophes do not delimit words. Thus, "didn't" is returned as "didnt", and "{\'O}'D{\'u}nlaing" is returned as "odunlaing".

bibindex examines the contents of all value strings, and expects them to be well-formed TeX input. In particular, braces and dollar signs should be balanced.

Errors detected result in a message giving the line number of the BibTeX entry in which the error was detected, and the line number at the point of the error. Unbalanced braces or dollar signs can result in large differences between these line numbers; in such a case, the error is somewhere in the entry indicated by the first line number.

OPTIONS

-i keyword: Add keyword to the list of BibTeX keywords that are to be ignored, along with their string values, in preparing the index. By default, all keyword = "value" pairs are indexed. Any number of -i switches and keywords may be specified.

AUTHOR

Jeff Erickson
Computer Science Division
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
USA
Email: <jeff@cs.berkeley.edu>, <jeffe@melody.berkeley.edu>

This program is in the public domain. You may use it or modify it to your heart's content, at your own risk.

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Time: 01:32:10 GMT, February 01, 2023