00readme.txt for amsrefs 2.03 [2007/10/22]

See section III (REMARKS ON THIS RELEASE) for notes on the
compatibility of this release with previous releases.

See also install.txt. There is a history of changes at the end of this
file.

This material is copyrighted by the American Mathematical society and
released subject to the LaTeX Project Public License.  See individual
files for additional information.

Please send bug reports and questions to tech-support@ams.org.

========================================================================

The amsrefs package deals with bibliographies and citations in LaTeX
documents. The basic citation command remains more or less the same as
in standard LaTeX (\cite), but a number of additional variations address
certain known pitfalls or gaps in the standard LaTeX set of citation
features.

The command for bibliography items is different -- \bib instead of
\bibitem -- for reasons that will be evident upon further reading in
the documentation.

A set of BibTeX style files are provided to allow people to extract
data from .bib files and produce .bbl files in amsrefs format instead
of conventional \bibitem format.

User documentation is in amsrdoc.pdf and amsrefs.faq.

Technical documentation (including documentation for package writers)
is in amsrefs.pdf.

========================================================================
I. FEATURES

-- Preservation of structure.

The internal structural information of the bibliography entries is not
lost when they are imported from the database file into the LaTeX
document. This takes on its greatest significance when archiving
documents in LaTeX form or transmitting them to another user (such as a
publisher).

-- Deferred formatting.

This means that the style of the bibliography can be changed on demand
without re-importing everything from the original database(s).

-- More natural data format for titles.

Proper nouns do not need to have braces added to prevent capitalization
problems.

-- Less ambiguous format for author names.

When author names are given in inverted order (last name first) it is
possible for LaTeX to unambiguously identify the last name without any
further markup, even in cases like Saunders Mac Lane (Mac Lane,
Saunders) versus Stephen H. Lane (Lane, Stephen H.), or Cam Van Tran
(Tran, Cam Van) versus Bert Van Keulen (Van Keulen, Bert). In
BibTeX some of these would need to have extra braces added to ensure
that the surname is accurately distinguished.

-- Author-year citations.

There is integrated support for citations in author-year form.

-- Back-reference support.

Works in conjunction with the hyperref package.

-- Setup requires only LaTeX knowledge.

All bibliography setup can be done in LaTeX; learning another
programming language (such as, the one used in BibTeX bst files) is
unnecessary.

-- Self-printable database files.

A LaTeX document that contains only a bibliography in amsrefs forms can
be used as a database for exporting entries to other documents. And
because it is a LaTeX document, the database can be printed directly at
any time simply by running it through LaTeX in the usual way.

-- Self-contained.

In many cases it seems possible to do without BibTeX entirely. For
example, if the entries are extracted from a single database file that
is maintained in sorted order, the bibliography can be printed directly
by LaTeX on the first pass and the citations resolved on the second
pass.

========================================================================
II. GETTING STARTED

1. Install the package, referring to install.txt as needed.

2. There are four example files provided:

   cite-xa : Demonstrates an author-year citation scheme. The
             bibliography is embedded in the .tex file instead of
             residing in a separate .bbl file.
 
   cite-xb : Demonstrates usage with more-or-less standard BibTeX
             methods.
 
   cite-xs : Shows how the bbl file can be created by LaTeX itself from a
             suitably presorted ltb file.
 
   cite-xh : A working hyperref/backrefs example.

3. Run LaTeX on cite-xa.tex. Take a look at the messages that have to
   do with citations and the bibliography section. Run LaTeX again to
   resolve the citations and check the output.

4. Run LaTeX on cite-xb.tex. Run BibTeX. Look at the bbl file.
   Interesting, huh? Run LaTeX twice more to resolve the citations.

5. Run LaTeX on cite-xs.tex and look at the output.

6. Run pdflatex on cite-xh.tex (it is set up to use BibTeX also, like
   cite-xb).

========================================================================
III. REMARKS ON THIS RELEASE

In brief, this release fixes a few bugs and implements one new
feature, the msc-links package option (see amsrdoc.pdf for more
information).

In addition, there are two incompatibilities with previous releases: 

1) The backrefs option no longer automatically loads the hyperref
   package.  This change was made so that you can use the backrefs
   feature without having to also enable hyperref links in your
   document.  If you wish both backrefs and hyperlinks, you must load
   the hyperref package explicitly:

       \usepackage{hyperref}
       \usepackage[backrefs]{amsrefs}

2) In articles from journals that have an issue number but no volume
   number, the issue number is now treated as a volume.  This means
   that articles that used to appear as, for example

       Inst. Hautes Itudes Sci. Publ. Math. (1997), no. 85, 97--191,

   will now be formatted as

       Inst. Hautes Itudes Sci. Publ. Math. \textbf{85} (1997), 97--191,

   in accordance with AMS house style.

Other than that, except for bug fixes, this version should be
backwards compatible with version 2.0 and version 2.02.

See section IV (CHANGE LOG) for a complete list of user-visible
changes.

========================================================================
IV. CHANGE LOG

2004-06-30 amsrefs.dtx 2.0 

    * Major rewrite of internals.  See changes.pdf for information on
      the user-visible changes.

2006-10-25 amsrefs.dtx 2.02

    -- Updated copyright and license fields.
    -- Numerous bug fixes.

    * amsrefs.dtx 2.02:
      -- Fixed bug in copying cross-referenced entries from .ltb files
         to the .bbl file.
      -- Fixed disappearing table of contents when used with AMS
         document classes.
      -- Enabled xrefs in more fields.
      -- Fixed spacing problems with \MR.  Also be more forgiving if
         the argument to \MR begins with "MR" or "MR ".
      -- Added support for showlabels.sty.
      -- Fixed some bugs in the interaction with hyperref.
      -- Removed support for the obsolete beta and jpa package options.

    * amsxport.dtx 2.01:
      -- Fixed bug in sort order of references.

2007-10-22 amsrefs.dtx 2.03

    -- .sty files now unpack into tex/latex/amsrefs instead of
       tex/latex/amscls.

    * amsrefs.dtx 2.03:
      -- Added the msc-links option.
      -- \nocite no longer produces a back reference with the backrefs
         option.
      -- The backrefs option no longer automatically loads hyperref.
      -- Fixed support for showkeys (not showlabels, as incorrectly
         stated in the release notes for 2.02) and the showkeys
         notcite option.
      -- Modified the bibdiv, bibchapter and bibsection environments
         to set the page headings correctly for non-AMS document
         classes.
      -- For journals with issue numbers but no volumes, the issue
         number is now treated as a volume number, per AMS house
         style.
      -- \cite and related commands can now be used within the fields
         of a \bib item, for example, note={See also \cite{SokalB1998}}

    * textcmds.dtx 1.06:
      -- Added \q for symmetry with \qq.
