[biblio] Bib(La)TeX style catalogue samples

[Karl Berry]

Hi Shakthi,

    The "harvard" package has been taken as an example, 

Wow. One of the most complicated packages.

    1. Should this quick reference or style be made available in the
    same source package or should it be collated together as a single
    document?

I think your work should be independent of the existing
documentation. In many cases it would be difficult for new releases of
the packages to happen.

Also, one of the major ideas of this "bib style catalogue" was to let
people easily browse through what's available so they can spot the
format they want and know what style to use.

I can imagine each style having its own source document and then pasting
the output together at the pdf level. Trying to process a document with
multiple bib styles seems an unnecessary (and highly nontrivial)
complication.

    2. Is the preferred output a PDF or HTML?

Ideally both. Maybe just running htlatex (https://tug.org/tex4ht) or
using one of the other html-output methods (lwarp, latexml) would
produce usable html? I'm not sure.

But if it has to be one or the other, I think it should be pdf, since
the catalogue will necessarily have lots of entries with only small
typographic differences, and I wouldn't trust html to be able to
reproduce them.

    with a "Quick Reference" section with three different styles:

Of the three, I rather like arrows since it is the shortest, which seems
appropriate for reference material like this. (Except the left and right
columns should be left-justified, not centered. Sorry, trying to ignore
formatting issues, but it's hard. :)

However, harvard is unusual in providing lots of LaTeX document
commands.  Most bib styles do not provide any document commands, but
merely change the format of the typeset bibliography. Thus the most
important thing to show in the catalogue is a consistent example of how
bib entries look. Overleaf has a nice table for this for the basic
styles: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Bibtex_bibliography_styles

Another big part of the project is figuring out a decent categorization
of the styles. Maybe the top level division should be whether the
entries are explicitly labeled (like [1] or [Pat88]) vs. named
("Patashnik, Oren").

    https://gitlab.com/shakthimaan/harvard/-/blob/main/harvard.dvi

pdf is easier to deal with than dvi :).

Thanks for taking this on,
Karl