embedding self-describing bibtex in dvi or pdf

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2019-10-29 at 11:01:05 +0000, Mike Marchywka wrote:

 > On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 11:53:58AM +0100, Uwe Ziegenhagen wrote:
 > >    Would something like attachfile help you?
 > >    [http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/attachfile/attachfile.pdf]http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/attachfile/attachf
 > >    ile.pdf
 > >    You could simply attach the bib file.
 > 
 > Thnks, in fact attaching the bib file is the example they use :)
 > Does anyone use this and what is the best way to extract it without
 > user intervention? I guess ideally it would not be just a file but
 > a set of arbitrary key-value pairs another utility could read like
 > pdfinfo but if it is there and can be found without having to parse
 > whole pdf file that is great too. Does this work for dvi or just
 > pdf?
 > 
 > If commonly used, that fixes the bibtex search for a large class of
 > documents.

I suppose that what you want is XML meta data.  PDF allows the inclusion
of an XMP file which contains such data.  The advantage is that XMP is
a standardized file format which can be processed with standard tools.

The pdfx LaTeX package written by Hàn Thế Thành and
C. V. Radhakrishnan and now maintained by Ross Moore creates such an
XMP file.  Try

  texdoc pdfx

in order to get the documentation.

However, if poeple want to cite your document, it's helpful if data is
available in BibTeX syntax as well one way or another.  It's possible
then to simply paste it into other documents without modification.
This is much easier than to assemble them from key-value pairs.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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