On Sep 12, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, September 12, 2007, at 09:48AM, "Rainer Sigwald"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On 9/12/07, Adam R. Maxwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Okay, using a document-relative path certainly makes sense in
>>> that situation. The question then becomes: should we keep this
>>> behavior, or break it now? (By break, I mean use home-relative
>>> instead of document-relative paths). Opinions from the users?
>>> What's easier for people to deal with? I think Mike may be
>>> responsible for the original implementation, so maybe he has
>>> comments.
>>
>> I strongly prefer the relative-to-bibfile implementation. I keep
>> both
>> my .bib file and my papers folder in a Subversion repository, which I
>> may check out to a different location periodically.
>>
>> I also have concerns about the new system with regard to
>> cross-platform compatibility and human readability. The current
>> system makes it quite easy to open the .bib file in (for example)
>> vim/emacs/Notepad and extrapolate from "local-url = {}" to find the
>> referenced file by hand. That doesn't seem possible with the
>> proposed
>> ASCII-armored Mac OS X alias. Is that correct, or am I
>> misunderstanding?
>
> This is correct. It should also be possible to keep the old system
> around, although I'm not sure how we'll manage autofile in that
> case. The only reason I can see for doing this is cross-platform
> compatibility; if you find using vi or (shudder) emacs easier than
> BibDesk on Mac OS, we're doing something wrong :).
>
> Incidentally, scripting would give you access to paths in the new
> system, so conceivably you could use a script hook to copy them to
> Local-Url when saving. No idea how practical that is.
FWIW, I favor keeping the document-relative paths as a backup for a
couple of reasons:
1)You can send an archive of a .bib file and the PDFs to someone
else; all of the local-url links still work if stored relatively.
2)Cross-platform compatibility: JabRef stores a "pdf" or "ps" field
that is relative to a "main PDF directory," so that if local-url is
copied to a "pdf" field (and the directory is correctly specified),
the links still work.
3)While you can't sling around your .bib file and have the links
still work (the advantage of home-directory-relative paths), the new
File Aliases method should fix that problem.
Slightly off-topic, 1) reminds me of a nice new feature of Endnote X
(yes, they actually added a new feature), which is to send a library
and its PDFs to a compressed archive which a user on the other end
can decompress and have all of the PDFs nicely linked. A similar
thing could be done with BibDesk fairly easily, I should link...
-AHM
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