/u/sy/beebe/tex/bibindex/2-4/README, Tue Jun 1 17:00:51 1993 Edit by Nelson H. F. Beebe This directory contains bibindex and biblook, programs for fast lookup in BibTeX bibliography data bases. They were written by Jeff Erickson, now at the University of California, Berkeley. bibindex converts a .bib file to a .bix file, which is a compact binary representation of the .bib file containing hash tables for fast lookup, as well as byte offset positions into the corresponding .bib file. biblook provides an interactive lookup facility using the .bix and .bib files. It verifies that the file version number and bibindex version number match its own values, and also compares the file time stamps so that it can detect whether the .bix file is out-of-date with respect to the .bib file. In either case, execution terminates. biblook may provide a more convenient, and faster, way of searching .bib files than text editors or pattern search utilities like the grep programs, particularly since it supports boolean operations between pairs of patterns. Both programs are documented in UNIX man pages, and the *.txt files are the output of nroff+col processing of the *.man files, so that documentation can read even if nroff is unavailable (e.g. non-UNIX systems, or UNIX systems where it is an extra-cost option). The programs so far run only under UNIX. Plans are to investigate the possibility of making them work on other operating systems. For very large bibliography files, it may be necessary to change the type Index_t in biblook.h from "unsigned short" to "unsigned int". The choice in version 2.4 and earlier of "unsigned short" is suitable for the SIGGRAPH and TeX User Group bibliography collections (SIGGRAPH: 6.7MB with 15,400 entries; TUG: 3.9MB with 14,600 entries). as of June 1993. Using "unsigned int" increases the size of the .bix files by 55% (TUG) to 68% (SIGGRAPH). Author of README and *.man files: Nelson H. F. Beebe Center for Scientific Computing Department of Mathematics University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA Email: beebe@math.utah.edu (Internet)