BIBCHECK 1 "11 October 1994" "Version 0.06"
Table of contents
bibcheck - check a BibTeX bibliography file
bibcheck <infile >outfile
or
bibcheck BibTeXfile(s) >outfile
bibcheck
applies heuristic checks to BibTeX files to
ferret out possible errors, portability problems,
and stylistic problems, often finding ones that
are quite difficult to spot by manual
proofreading.
Some of the checks made are
-
duplicate
@String
abbreviations;
¤
duplicate citation labels;
¤
use of comma instead of
and
in author/editor names;
¤
ellipses represented by consecutive dots, rather
than by a TeX control sequence;
-
horizontal tabs instead of spaces;
-
unprotected special characters (ampersand,
percent, sharp sign) that would have special
significance to TeX;
-
subscripts or superscripts outside of math mode;
-
unclosed math mode;
-
space before punctuation;
-
spaces missing after initials;
-
tildes (TeX's tie command should be rare
in BibTeX files, because BibTeX normally
supplies needed ones);
-
non-standard characters in citation labels;
-
spurious blank lines;
-
braced partial words;
-
unbraced mixed-case words in titles;
-
hyphens instead of en-dashes in page-number
ranges;
-
quotation marks inside strings;
-
trailing white space.
Warning messages identify the file name and line
number, in a format recognized by the GNU Emacs
compile
command, so that you can run it from within an
Emacs session, and then position rapidly to the
source file locations where the messages were
raised.
lacheck(1)
performs similar checks on LaTeX files; its
great utility was the inspiration for this
program.
BibTeX has loose syntactical requirements that
the current simple implementation of
bibcheck
does not support. In particular, outer
parentheses may
not
be used in place of braces following ``@keyword''
patterns. If you have such a file, you can use
bibclean(1)
to prettyprint it into a form that
bibcheck
can handle successfully.
bibclean(1),
bibextract(1),
biblex(1),
biborder(1),
bibparse(1),
bibsort(1),
bibtex(1),
bibunlex(1),
emacs(1),
lacheck(1),
nawk(1).
Nelson H. F. Beebe, Ph.D.
Center for Scientific Computing
Department of Mathematics
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Tel: +1 801 581 5254
FAX: +1 801 581 4148
Email: <[email protected]>