[plug] LyX and BibTeX

[Adrian Blockley]

On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, Christian wrote:

> Peter Wright wrote:
> > > Has anyone ever gotten LyX and BibTeX working together?

> > No, you haven't just been very unlucky when looking, BibTeX really is one
> > of the worst documented pieces of software ever. :)
> 
> I figured so. :)
> 
> > The btxdoc.dvi is the main useful manual - it's rather obtuse in places,
> > but as long as you have a reasonable grasp of LaTeX, etc., it's good enough
> > for most purposes.
> 
> Yeah... I guess I might have to give that a try... otherwise I'll just
> use the bibliography bit built into LyX - it's going to be awkward for
> the number of references I'll have but still more manageable than all
> the people doing their work in MS Word... :P
> 
> >From what I can tell, LyX does all this for you...  It appears to run
> LaTeX then BibTeX and then LaTeX again...  one would assume since it
> supports BibTeX that it would be able to do this correctly... 
> 

Ok I have tried running Lyx with bibtex and it seems to work ok.  I
cheated a bit though. I didn't read the Lyx manual but I am using the
gnome tool gbib which provides hooks to use with lyx.  I have already been
using gbib to help manage my references for my thesis and already had a
database created so this made things a bit easier.

To get it to work I had to add a line to the ~/.lyx/lyxrc file

\serverpipe "/home/blockley/.lyxpipe"

Having done this it was just a matter of firing up gbib and lyx and
selecting a reference in gbib and hitting the "lyx reference" button in
gbib.  A small box popped up with three buttons

1- "insert cite"
2- "inset bibtex"
3- "insert database"

Selecting 1 caused the cite reference to be inserted in a small grey box
containing the citation key on the lyx window.

Selecting inseted another grey box with the words "BibTeX generated
references". Clicking on this box raised a window with to fields - one
labeled database which contained the name of my bibtex database (without
the ".bib" extension. The second field was labeled style and contains the
bibtex style which defaults to plain.

Selecting "view dvi" under the file menu ran latex and bibtex and showed
my file with the references and the bibliography at the end of the file.

The biggest problem I had was making sure I had the path names correct.
Once I sorted this out it worked fine.

Let me know if you need any help.

Cheers

Adrian

  

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Adrian Blockley		! 9360 6394 
Environmental Science	!
Murdoch University	!