On 2007-October-08 , at 11:38 , Christiaan Hofman wrote:
> On 8 Oct 2007, at 9:16 AM, jiho wrote:
>> On 2007-October-08 , at 08:38 , Simon Spiegel wrote:
>>>> Just out of curiosity, what would help the non-LaTeX users the
>>>> most?
>>>> People have mentioned integration with word processors. What
>>>> would it
>>>> look like? Basic RTF scanning wouldn't be too hard. A UI for
>>>> templates would be nice, too.
>>>
>>> An UI would certainly be a good idea. I don't think that many users
>>> would use BibDesk with its current template system even if it had
>>> RTF
>>> scanning. Toom many users would be scared by it. I'd use it, but I'm
>>> certainly not the average user. I also think that the template
>>> system
>>> needs improvement to deal with more complex styles. For example more
>>> options how to deal with multiple authors/editors or with stuff like
>>> 'ibid.'.
>>
>
> I doubt whether the template mechanism needs to be more complex, it
> is already quite complex and capable. See also below. For example, it
> is quite capable to do something like the standard bibtex styles (the
> Wiki has templates for abbrv.bst and plain.bst).
>
>> I also think a GUI to build bibliography styles would be very
>> welcome. I suggested this in back in 2005:
>> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?
>> msg_id=9787bb9212cc90ffa59662781198cb8a%40gmail.com
>> [NB: sorry the links to the images are broken, I lost them]
>> and it was considered too big to be in the scope of BibDesk at that
>> time. The context seems to be the same today: people want tighter
>> integration between bibdesk and their word processors and, to do
>> that, a way to scan the document for citations as well as to format
>> the references list is needed.
>> If such a UI is build, I would love it to output rtf templates as
>> well as something more LaTeX related (since apparently most current
>> users of BD use LaTeX). At the time of my first post, I thought about
>> writing .bst files, with BibTeX code, but the fact that it is a new
>> language, and a not very user-friendly one, adds some complexity.
>> Now, if this UI could output files suitable for biblatex, which is
>> much easier to use than bibtex, it would be great.
> I personally have trouble imagining a workable UI to build templates.
> The template syntax is quite complex, and the only UIs I can think of
> would either be able to handle only simple templates, or they would
> be more bothersome to work with than the raw template itself. I don't
> know how the other managers (like Bookends and Sente) work with their
> "template" UI, but I guess they only use a much simplified syntax (in
> our terms, the equivalent of only value tags).
I don't know the RTF template mechanism well but I was thinking at a
UI like this (very quick draft):
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/bd_styles_ui.png
- On the left, a list of publication types, taken from BibDesk
- On the right:
. a list of fields, which changes according to the pub type, with
mandatory bibtex fields in red. The list of fields is also taken from
bibdesk (custom fields appear here)
. an "Inline citations" and a "References list" fields in which
tokens can be drag and dropped to select what will be printed in each
case. Plus, one can also write in these sections (but I cannot find
how to do this in interface builder). Therefore one can write:
[Author], [Year]. [Title], In: [Journal] etc.
. an option view, with options depending on each token (here some
possible options are shown for the [Author] token, which is probably
the most complex to print).
. a preview of what the output will look like
I think such a UI would be quite straightforward to use and could be
interfaced to many template mechanisms (BD own templates, biblatex,
bibtex etc.)
The cumbersome part with such a UI would be to do the templating for
all publication types. There are two solutions I can think of:
- never start from scratch: BD provides two of three templates to
start from, e.g. an author-year one, a numbered one etc. maybe from
the three or four classic bibtex styles
- define one reference type as a master (as shown here). The
modifications done on this master propagates the all other pub types
and then one only modifies them.
> I think a better road for users for whom building a template is too
> complicated is to provide an (extensive) library of standard citation
> and bibliography styles. That could be done mostly by users I think.
While this could be an efficient solution, I don't think it will be
viable if there is not an easy way to produce the templates. I have
experience in doing it for latex bibliography styles:
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/bstdatabase/
and most styles were collected by me from publishers web pages
(actually the large majority comes from elsevier which gives one
template for all their journals: 2000 journals in the database). I
received approximately 30 submissions of new styles in two years, 10
of which being brand new, the rest of them being downloaded from
publishers I did not visit. So I don't really consider this database
to be a success in providing people with ready made styles.
I made the information quite public when creating the database: there
are links to it from several bibtex manager software (I sent and
email to BibDesk list but you did not link to it sadly :( ), from the
wiki page on bibtex, I received emails from people on CRAN etc.
Furthermore, this was targeted to a user base larger than bibdesk
one: anyone using latex+bibtex or amsrefs or biblatex could have use
for such a database. Still, there were not enough submissions to make
it really useful in my opinion. And I think this is mostly because it
is quite difficult to produce those styles in the first place:
- writing raw bibtex is a pain
- using makebst is convoluted and inflexible
- amsrefs is easy but relies on a non bibtex database and adds an
extra step to create it from the bibtex file. plus it does not
provide a bbl equivalent in the end, making it non-standard and not
easy to provide to publishers (outside of AMS of course ;))
- biblatex is not stable yet
Therefore, I really think an UI simple enough for everyone to use is
necessary to grow a template library. And I would love to see such a
library grow!
JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
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