On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 22:53:23 +0000, "Jonathon Blake"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> John wrote:
> 
> >It just does nowhere near enough.
> 
> Pretty much everything you describe is an known issue.
> 
> Except that I didn't know anybody had successfully manged to get APA
> bibliography style corectly done, using the Bibliography component.

"Actually it was not *that* hard", he said modestly.

I had already gotten used to most of the structure and formating
techniques from reviewing the TOC part of the chapter and setting up
formating in Bibus (Pierre Martineau's bibliographics program for OOo.)

And of course I did a very easy version of an APA format: A journal
entry is pretty basic. 

IIRC the creater of Papyrus claims that no-one has ever produced a
completely error free APA reference list :)  He seemed to think it was a
bit complicated or even abritrary.

If you are willing to spend the time I don't see any reason you could
not produce almost any kind of format with the Bibliographic component.
The problem is that it is just not worth the effort. IF it is possible
to save formating the Bibliographic component is still extremely poor
but perhaps of some, limited,  use. If not, as far as I can see, it is a
waste of time and effort. I could format a bunch of references and store
them in table for cutting and pasting more quickly.

> There was a team working on it, but it seems to have fizzled out over
> the last year.

I was aware that there is/was a team working on an improved
Bibliographic component and I am not surprised that most of the problems
are known at least to some people. 

My real concern is that we do not mislead new users into using a
disfunctional piece of software. I've been using APA format for many
years and over the last 4-5 years have used or played with around
half-a-dozen bibliographic software packages. It probably took me 15-20
minutes to realise just how limited the OOo Bibliographic component is.  

I can see some poor student spending days setting things up only to find
that he or she has a close to unuseable bibliography. 


-----
  John Kane
  Kingston ON Canada
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  (613)888-2399

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