[texhax] File conversion

[Axel E. Retif]

On  30 Aug, 2008, at 07:43, Prof. Sheila Prasad wrote:

> I created a bibliography for my book manuscript using BibTex. The copy
> editors cannot open the .bib file and requested me to send them  
> either a
> .bbl or .bst file.
>  Please advise me about this file conversion.
> Thank you.
> Sheila Prasad

Prof. Voss has been kind to my fellows (I'm a copy-editor myself) --- 
how come they can't open your .bib file? It's a plain text file, and  
if you make it right, it looks something like this

@BOOK{Kurzweil90,
    AUTHOR = {Raymond Kurzweil},
    ADDRESS = {Cambridge, Massachusetts},
    KEY = {Kurzweil, 1990},
    PUBLISHER = {MIT Press},
    TITLE = {The Age of Intelligent Machines},
    YEAR = {1990}
}

and so on.

When you run BibTeX it reads your .bib file and, following  
instructions from a .bst (bibliography style) file it outputs a .bbl  
file, which LaTeX reads to typeset your bibliography. The three are  
different things.

Once you have a .bib file with your references as above (which can  
have any name, like prasad-biblio.bib), you tell LaTeX, in your  
preamble, which bibliography package to use; v.gr.,

\usepackage[round]{natbib}

then, in your document, where the bibliography should appear, you put,  
for example,

\bibliography{prasad-biblio}%
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

The Natbib documentation tells you to put \bibliographystyle{xxxx}  
just after \begin{document}. For me, it has worked as above. Read the  
excellent Natbib documentation:

texdoc natbib

at your terminal or Command Prompt. Your .bib file doesn't have to  
have the same title as your LaTeX document (you can reuse it for all  
your papers); but the .bbl file will have the same name as your  
document.tex.

Best,

Axel