Dear Developers, (long-ish email... for the punchline, just read the
last para, else read the entire thing),
First, thanks to Adam M. I am on my way now happily adding and
subtracting entries to groups. Indeed, the pasteboard server, whatever
that is, had died, and rebooting brought everything back to normal.
Now, a list of suggestions (mind it, this is NOT a list of complaints).
We have had long, continuing discussions on what BD really is -- in
the minds of many, dare I say all, it is the winningest bib manager.
For those who work with TeX, it is also makes for a robust citation
system. But, at least for me, who prefers to stay away from TeX,
making the final product, a document with citations and
bibliographies, is still quite difficult.
First thing, perhaps the most important thing, I would suggest is to
make BD as strict as a "strongly typed language." For now, I can stuff
anything in BD, and it happily takes it. The problem comes when I try
to interface BD with any other program. Some of you might recall that
I was having the darndest time trying to import my bib into CiteULike
or Connotea. There were many opaque errors (or no error messages at
all), but the closest descriptive error I would get was that some of
my entries were too long. Well, the culprits were the Annote and
Abstract fields that I had merrily filled with my notes. In one case,
I had stuffed the text of the entire paper in the Annote field... it
was convenient for me to look up the plain text, and BD didn't
complain when I stuffed the text in. Well, apparently it violated
BibTeX's rules.
Moving on, I gave up on CiteULike and Connotea, for the time being,
and went back to BD. Until yesterday -- I tried using LyX, as much as
I disliked using such an "anvil and hammer" looking system on my Mac.
It seemed to work. Funnily, LyX's citation inserting workflow was
really smooth and quick. Soon, I had my article text in LyX, with
several citations scattered within. Then I decided to do a preview in
PDF, and all hell broke loose. All kinds of errors that I couldn't
even figure out where they were coming from. After much diagnosis, I
realized that LyX was complaining about errors in my BD database.
Because there were "illegal characters" (mostly quotation marks in
Abstract and Annote fields), LyX was not even processing my document
for replacing \cite{...} with citations. Seems like I can't type
something "as simple as this" in the Abstract field without violating
BibTex rules (Tex items at zero-depth... etc.)
So, I tried my Perl script for doing a scan and replace. Well, I got
the following --
=================
~/bibliography.bib, line 69, warning: found " at brace-depth zero in
string (TeX accents in BibTeX should be inside braces)
~/bibliography.bib, line 140, warning: found " at brace-depth zero in
string (TeX accents in BibTeX should be inside braces)
lexical buffer overflowed (reallocating to 4000 bytes)
..
lexical buffer overflowed (reallocating to 10000 bytes)
lexical buffer overflowed (reallocating to 12000 bytes)
lex_auxiliary.c:162: failed assertion `(txt[0] == '{' && txt[len-1] ==
'}') || (txt[0] == '\"' && txt[len-1] == '\"')'
Abort trap
=================
Finally, getting desperate, I went into my bibliography using
TextWrangler, cropped all text entries to really short (to avoid the
"lexical buffer overflows") removed all double-quotes, and was finally
able to import the entire db into RefWorks (web edition). Then I
re-inserted the citations in my text using RefWorks schema, and was
successfully able to have RefWorks scan and replace to create a decent
looking manuscript in RTF.
The cleaned up bib also imported successfully into CiteULike and Connotea.
BD + some word processor of choice (my choice happens to be Apple's
excellent Pages) workflow is still a long ways away. I can very nicely
and smoothly insert \cite{...} keys into Scrivener, but then I can't
do much with that. However, many of my problems would have been
avoided if I had made a "valid" BD database in the first place.
For that, I urge the developers (who, by the way, are compleatly
wonderful folks) to make BD more strict by not allowing me, the user,
enter into it anything that would be illegal downstream.
Many thanks,
--
Puneet Kishor
http://punkish.eidesis.org/
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/
Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)
http://www.osgeo.org/
Summer 2007 S&T Policy Fellow, The National Academies
http://www.nas.edu/
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