- Object-oriented
CrossTeX bibliographic databases are easy to develop and maintain without errors. The user needs to enter conference, workshop, author and venue information only once; there is no need to re-enter the same information multiple times for every citation. Avoids errors and inconsistencies.
- HTML Support
CrossTeX can generate
both the bibliography section of scholarly LaTeX papers, as well as
web pages containing references. Makes it easy
for researchers to maintain web pages with professionally formatted
lists of references.
- Easier citations
CrossTeX supports citations where a paper can
be identified not by a hard-to-memorize key, but instead through a
short meaningful description. This allows papers to be cited by recalling author names, conference and year, for instance, instead of a specific tag
that is difficult to remember.
Inspired by Norman Ramsey's nbibtex.
- Extensive databases
CrossTeX contains a large database of past computer science conferences.
- Conference contents
Papers that appeared in seminal conferences, such as SOSP, OSDI, SIGCOMM etc. are part of the CrossTeX distribution. All papers can be cited using a uniform citation key.
- Conference locations
All locations and months for all major conferences are part of the
distribution. No need to figure out where a past conference took place
when citing a paper.
- Plain old better
Crosstex has a number of features that lead to good-looking, consistent, professionally-formatted references.
- New object types
Supports all BibTeX objects plus some new objects frequently encountered
in technical fields, such as Internet RFCs, patents and URLs.
- Proper capitalization
No more inconsistent capitalization. CrossTeX ensures that all paper titles
conform to the same standard regardless of how they appear in the database.
- Include files
A bibliography can be broken up into modular units, facilitating
easy management.
- Multiple keys
Database objects can have multiple keys. You can refer to the object by
any one of multiple descriptive names.
- Short and long-form references
Trivial to go from fully-qualified place names to just state abbreviations or from long author names to initials. Ideal for dealing with the space crunch before the submission deadline, and the formal, long-form citations by the camera-ready deadline.
- Non-English names
CrossTeX puts a priority on handling names with non-English conventions and accented characters; full Unicode support is on the horizon, and all of the algorithms dealing with names have been carefully crafted to handle a wide variety of conventions. Mistakes in handling even the most complex names automatically should be brought to our attention as bugs.
- Sanity checking
Running CrossTeX on a database (.XTX or .BIB file) will check all entries for conformance. No more running into problems at the last minute when entries are cited. A database can be proactively checked as entries are added.
- Extensible
Easy to develop new object types or citation styles through plugins
written in Python.
- Compatible
Crosstex is fully compatible with LaTeX and can be used as a
compatible replacement for BibTeX.
- Backwards-compatible with BibTex
All BibTeX databases are also legitimate Crosstex databases and can be
used as input.
- Back-conversion
If you must revert to BibTeX, you can convert a CrossTeX database (.XTX) into a BibTeX database (.BIB) at any time with the xtx2bib command.