On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:07:50 +1000, "Jean Hollis Weber"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> John Kane wrote:

----clip
> Thanks, John, for the info and recommendation. Bibus is indeed 
> the program I was referring to, and from your comments I agree 
> that just a reference to it should be sufficient.
> 
> It's good to talk to someone with experience in this area, since 
> I have none! Do you think it is worth expanding the info on using 
> OOo's bibliography function itself in the Writer Guide? Even if 
> it is just to answer some common questions by saying "alas, you 
> cannot do that without Bibus" or "here's a workaround for doing 
> it in OOo"?
> 
> --Jean

I don't think it is necessary to expand the section on the OOo
bibliographic function. As I remember it from testing it out last fall
the instructions were fairly clear and, much as I dislike the thing, I
do believe it is possible to get almost any format for the actual
reference.  

What may be needed is some warnings.  1) One cannot save a format, as
far as I could see.  This means that if you are revising a paper and add
or remove some references you need to redo all the formatting.  This is
not a trivial task.  2) The 'short name' function is set.  This is fine
if you are only using one short form (essentally publishing in one set
of journals, say APA) however if you need something as trivial as a
change from "Johnson, 2006" to Johnson-06" you must manually edit all
the short name for all your selected  entries in the database.

There probably is a 3) but it escapes me for the moment.  I do think we
want to make a reference to Bibus.  Reportedly there is a commercial
product (Scholars's Aid, I think) that also integrates well with OOo. 
I'd say that for any serious academic use something with, at least, the
functionality of Bibus is required.    
-----
  John Kane
  Kingston ON Canada
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  (613) 888-2399

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