A main feature of WibTeX is the interface to BibTeX, a TeX package by Oren Patashnik. TeX is a professional and free document preparation system. Many books and especially scientific texts are set in TeX. BibTeX permits to cite from a central database file and has many formatting features. This way references once typed are available in all new documents, and the table of references can be generated automatically.

WibTeX also provides an interface to Microsoft Word (version 2000 and above). You may not only store the entire database in a rich text file (RTF) or a web document (HTM) but also make individual configurations as to: selection of fields, sequence, preceding and following characters, formatting.

Since version 7.3, support has been added for OpenOffice Writer, basically with the same functions that are available for the Word interface. Direct quoting in LyX is being supported since version 7.4 - given you have a LyX installation no older than version 1.6.5.

BibTeX special features

It is very important to use the key word "and" when referring to more than one author.

If you choose to use BibTeX seriously, then you should get familiar with the way it works. A good documentation can be found in the appendix of the standard LaTeX book by Leslie Lamport, A Document Preparation System, Addison-Wesley. Here I only want to point out the way author names should be entered:

FirstName1 LastName1 and FirstName2 LastName2 and FirstName3 LastName3...

Middle names can simply be put in between. This format should also be used for later usage in Microsoft Word. WibTeX will deal with the necessary formatting.

The database format

Since version 6, WibTeX manages its data in a propriatary format. Data maybe exchanged via the import/export to the BibTeX text file format or, alternatively, via the CSV table format, which can be read by Microsoft Excel, among other applications.