To understand the meaning of BibTeX we need to explain the TeX and LaTeX applications first since they play an important rol one way or another in the BibTeX.
TeX is a Typography system created in 1984 by Donland E. Knuth. It was created for 2 main things ampong others. It was a system created for all computers the same way, they wanted it to function then, now and in the future in any type of computer. The creators ot TeX also wanted to help anyone create really good quality books without spending to much time on it. TeX is mostly used in mathematics, physics,and any field related to this ones. TeX is very difficult to fraction, it needs another TeX to be divided usually, for this it expands.TeX is used to create complex math equations usually used in LaTeX. For example to write the well known quadratic fromula we need to give the system several commands so it looks like the way we would have written it b hand. For the system to know that it is an equation, we need to write the symbol $ at the begining and end of our whole equation command. TeX also gives the perfect spacing for our formulae since writing mathematic formulae and writing a regular text do not need the same space in between lines. In an equation there are going to be likes really close to each other but later when he hit the space bottom when we finish our equation qe expect to have more space to be able to differenciate the equations.
LaTeX is a documental markup language system it is also a system that prepares the document we wanna write to accept TeX writing type. That´s how these first 2 systems are connected within each other. We can not use LaTeX to edit our text, it is only used to explain the language we are using to write the document. LaTeX is used in writing mathematics, philosophy, law,… and other type of documents as well as translating XML documents to PDF because of how rich TeX writing type is. This system was created to help the authors of those books to concentrate in the writing not in the style of the books, since LaTeX would be the one taking care of it.
BibTeX and LaTeX usually are two systems that work together. It is not that whenever we use LaTeX we need to use this tool, but usually if not always when we use BibTeX we also use LaTeX. BibTeX was created by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985. It is an application used in listing references.BibTeX helps separate and divide mostly biographical information from the actual presentation od this one for example. This tool, like LaTeX does, helps the author concentrate in the writing over the style of it.
In this system the bibliographical information appears with a “.bib”in the end and these informations can be divided into article, book, booklet,conference, inbook, incollection, and inproceedings among others. This information or entry will have a definition of what it is, the required fields that we are going to need in order to complete the bibliography and then some other optional or extra fiels entries that we can add to it. For example, an article will have author, title, journal, and year as its mandatory fields and the adress, the edition, or notes could be some of the alternative fields that we could also mention. The style of the bibliographical information, on the other hand, comes with the “.bst”ending. As in most documents, the style is explained by a simple markup language, what this language does is tell the document how each one of the archives needs to look like. So let´s say that a mark up language like HTML could be used to write the bibliographical document, even though HTML is not the most commonly used one for that purpose.
We can find this system in the reference webpage that we have been using named CiteULike where a lot of bibliographical information is used. BibTeX is also used in a lot of bibliographical libraries for ovious reasons.
REFERENCES:
TeX, Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 6th, 2010 from http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
TeX frequently asked questions. Retrieved December 15th, 2010 at 17:48 from http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatTeX
What are TeX LaTeX and friends? from CTAN. Retrieved December 15th, 2010 at 18:02 from http://www.ctan.org/what_is_tex.html
LaTeX, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 6th, 2010 from http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
An introduction to LaTeX. Retrieved December 15th, 2010 from http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html
What the heck is LaTeX? Retrieved December 15th, 2010 from http://scottmcpeak.com/latex/whatislatex.html
BibTeX, Wikipedia The free Encyclopedia.Retrieved June 6th, 2010 from http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX
BibTeX, BibTeX.org. Retrieved June 6th 2010 from http://www.bibtex.org/
