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+XBibFile grew out of an early need in my research. I needed some
+technique to handle my research references.
+
+The School of Information Technology where I was doing my research, at
+that time was promoting the use of EndNotes for handling for referencing.
+However, EndNotes was a Windows application and not available on Unix, or
+specifically, Linux. Because of my background in Commputer Science, I
+had made a decision early in my research to use Linux as my research
+environment, using LaTeX (and possibly TeX) as my typesetting tools.
+Linux had the attributes of being available at the "right price" on both
+Intel and Digital Alpha hardware architectures which I would be using,
+was stable in operation, and contained the broad suite of tools
+available under the Open Source policy. BibTeX was to be the format
+in which my references were to be recorded and processed. Although the
+EndNotes format could be converted into BibTeX format, running a
+Windows environment for EndNotes and a Linux environment for every
+thing else appeared a little strange.
+
+The problem was that CTAN appeared not to has a program that could
+provide the support I required for my reference making and handling.
+What I required was:
+ . a method of inputting the references that presenced both the
+ required and optional fields for any of the reference types
+ handled by BibTeX;
+ . a mechanism of cross-linking references so that I could keep
+ track of the route by which that reference had been arrived,
+ e.g. this reference appears in the reference list of another
+ reference in my bibliography;
+ . a graphical means of inserting and removing cross-links between
+ references;
+ . a means of following those cross-links -- clicking on the
+ appropriate link field would bring-up a window appropriate for
+ that reference, or if already on the screen, bringing it to the
+ top;
+ . enabled the linking into each reference, the address of files which
+ were related e.g. the path and name of a text file that
+ contained a summary of the paper but was prepared independent of
+ XBibFile i.e. in addition to any notes that were recorded in the
+ "annote" field of the BibTeX recoord.
+All this was to be accomplished using the BibTeX .bib file without
+compromising its direct use with the BibTeX program.
+
+I gave myself a week to write the program to accomplish the above
+requirements or at least to demonstrate that the concept was
+achievable. The week was from Sunday 26 September 1999 until Sunday 3
+October. During that week I had no tutoring commitments and my two
+thesis supervisors were absent so I would have few obstacles to my
+progress. As a first step, this README file was prepared so that I
+could keep track of what I was trying to accomplish. As the week
+continued, additions were made to this README.
+
+I looked at a number of programs available from CTAN but none quite
+filled my requirements. XBibTeX by Nicolas J. Kelly and Christian
+H. Bischof provided the required BibTeX entry creation mechanism.
+However, I experienced problems with the operation of the program:
+with no warning the program would core-dump when saving an entry,
+loosing all the work invested in that entry. Whether that behaviour
+was due to my use of X11 R6 as opposed to the source codes stated
+need for X11 R4, I remain uncertain. But since XBibTeX only handled a
+part of my requirements, I determined that resolving that problem was not
+good use of my time. I tried BibView by Holger Martin, Peter Urban,
+and Armin Liebl but could not get it to compile. Gerd Neugebauer's
+BibTool provided manipulation capabilities for a BibTeX database which
+offered promise, but first the database had to be created.
+
+The first question was how to implement the project. My initial
+thinking was to embed my requirements somehow inside a Web browser
+because browsers have the required address linking capabilities
+already built-in. However, I anticipated difficulties with that
+approach in generating the BibTeX database entries and placing them on
+disk. The alternative was to write in C with a X toolkit. Of the
+toolkits available to me, the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) looked the most
+promising and also I wanted to get some experience in programming with
+it. My interest in GTK+ occurred after reading the documentation that
+accompanied version 1.0. However, that documentation contained many
+gaps in the information. With Red Hat Linux 6.0 came version 1.2.1 of
+GTK+ and that resolved may of those perceived shortcomings. The
+writing of XBibFile was accompanied by my learning to program with the
+GTK+.
+
+The development environment used was a Toshiba Satellite 4060XCDT
+laptop computer with a 14.1" colour display and 64MB of memory. On
+that hardware, Red Hat Linux 6.0 was run which consisted of a 2.2.5
+Linux kernel with egcs version 1.1.2, and GTK+ version 1.2.1.
+
+During that first week, the majority of time was taken up in learning
+to use the GTK toolkit. First the latest version (1.2.5) available on
+the Internet was downloaded. It was hoped that the developers of the
+package would have improved the state of ddocumentation included in
+earlier distributions. That was not the case. To supplement the
+documentation, the examples included in the distribution allowed a
+level of understanding to be obtained. By the afternoon of Friday,
+enough of an understanding of GTK had been obtained to enable work on
+XBibFile to commence.
+
+It took 10 days of fairly intensive work to get the first stage of the
+program completed. By that time, a reference could be created and
+stored. Work then ceased. Upon using BibTeX for another project, I
+realised that the NOTE entry was incorrect. That entry was ment for
+introducing annotation with each reference but was not supposed to be
+included when a reference list was generated via BibTeX. Kopka and
+Daly[1999] indicate that such a field should be titled ANNOTE. Also
+Kopka and Daly[1999] indicate that the NOTE field was required in an
+entry of type UNPUBLISHED; it was optional in all others. ANNOTE was
+adopted in XBibFile as it appeared to be more appropriate.