Hyperlatex understands the thebibliography environment. Like
LaTeX, it creates a chapter or section (depending on the document
class) titled "References". The \bibitem command sets a
label with the given cite key at the position of the reference.
This means that you can use the \link command to define a
hyperlink to a bibliography entry.
The command \Cite is defined analogously to \Ref and
\Pageref by \link. If you define a bibliography like
this
\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\bibitem{latex-book}
Leslie Lamport, \cit{\LaTeX: A Document Preparation System,}
Addison-Wesley, 1986.
\end{thebibliography}
then you can add a reference to the LaTeX-book as follows:
... we take a stroll through the
\link{\LaTeX-book}[~\Cite]{latex-book}, explaining ...
Furthermore,
the command \htmlcite generates the printed citation itself (in our
case, \htmlcite{latex-book} would generate
"[1]"). The command \cite is approximately
implemented as \link{\htmlcite{#1}}{#1}, so you can use it as usual
in LaTeX, and it will automatically become an active hyperlink, as in
"[1]". (The actual definition allows you to use
multiple cite keys in a single \cite command.)
Hyperlatex also understands the \bibliographystyle command
(which is ignored) and the \bibliography command. It reads the
.bbl file, inserts its contents at the given position and
proceeds as usual. Using this feature, you can include bibliographies
created with BibTeX in your HTML-document!
It would be possible to design a WWW-server that takes queries
into a BibTeX database, runs BibTeX and Hyperlatex
to format the output, and sends back an HTML-document.
The formatting of the
bibliography can be customized by redefining the bibliography
environment thebibliography and the Hyperlatex macro
\htmlbibitem. The default definitions are
\newenvironment{thebibliography}[1]%
{\chapter{References}\begin{description}}{\end{description}}
\newcommand{\htmlbibitem}[2]{\label{#2}\item[{[#1]}]}
If you use BibTeX to generate your bibliographies, then you will
probably want to incorporate hyperlinks into your .bib
files. No problem, you can simply use \xlink. But what if you also
want to use the same .bib file with other (vanilla) LaTeX files, which do not define the \xlink command? What if you want to
share your .bib files with colleagues around the world who do
not know about Hyperlatex?
Here is a trick that solves this problem without defining a new BibTeX style or something similar: You can put a URL into the note field of a BibTeX entry as follows:
note = "\def\HTML{\XURL}{ftp://nowhere.com/paper.ps}"
This is perfectly understandable for plain LaTeX, which will simply
ignore the funny prefix \def\HTML{\XURL} and typeset the URL.
In your Hyperlatex source, however, you can put these definitions in the preamble:
\W\newcommand{\def}{}
\W\newcommand{\HTML}[1]{#1}
\W\newcommand{\XURL}[1]{\xlink{#1}{#1}}
This will turn the note field into an active hyperlink to the
document in question.
(An alternative approach would be to redefine some LaTeX command in
Hyperlatex, such as \relax.)