Making TeX Work

Chapter 12. Bibliographies, Indexes, and Glossaries

Bibliographies and indexes are typically difficult to incorporate into a document. Bibliographies have stringent, but varying, presentation requirements (the MLA wants bibliographies to look one way, the Association of Computing Machinery wants them another, etc.). Indexes don't vary that much, but they are tedious to put together.

BibTeX provides a powerful mechanism for handling bibliographies and citations. Tib is another bibliography package for TeX. The MakeIndex program helps manage the construction of one or more indexes for a document. Glossaries are also constructed with the MakeIndex program.

BibTeX

What's wrong with doing bibliographies by hand? Two things. First, it is tedious to typeset each bibliography entry according to the strict requirements of the publisher. Chances are, you'll have to look up the requirements each time, and you're bound to make mistakes. Second, no matter what field you work in, it's likely that you'll cite some of the same articles and books in more than one publication. Computers are supposed to reduce effort, not replicate it.

BibTeX provides a powerful mechanism for dealing with bibliographies in a mechanical way, considerably reducing effort on your part. Rather than formatting each bibliography entry, you build a database of bibliography information. Each time you want to make a citation, you simply use BibTeX to build the bibliography from your database into your document. That's easy ...