RefDB README
============

Please see the accompanying NEWS file for backwards-incompatible
changes, bugfixes, and improvements.


Overview
========

RefDB is a reference database and bibliography software. It helps
scientists, publishers, and anyone else writing publications to keep
track of journal articles, books, and other printed or electronic
material, to associate notes with their material, and to automatically
generate bibliographies for all kinds of publications. The primary
output formats are RIS, DocBook SGML/XML, TEI XML, and TeX compatible
with bibtex/natbib. Other SGML and XML document types can be added by
creating suitable stylesheets.

RefDB runs on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin/OSX, Solaris,
Windows/Cygwin, and probably a bunch of other Unixish
systems. Precompiled binaries are (sometimes) available for Cygwin,
Linux, and Solaris

RefDB uses MySQL or PostgreSQL as external database servers, or SQLite
as an embedded database engine.

Creating DocBook SGML documents with automatically generated
bibliographies requires a DSSSL engine and DSSSL
stylesheets. Jade/OpenJade and Norm Walsh's DocBook stylesheets are a
good choice here.

Creating DocBook or TEI XML documents with automatically generated
bibliographies requires a XSLT engine and DocBook or TEI XSL
stylesheets, respectively. xsltproc is an excellent choice.

RefDB is at home at http://refdb.sourceforge.net.
RefDB is maintained by Markus Hoenicka <mhoenicka@users.sourceforge.net>




