I am prefacing this by saying that I find BD to be immensely powerful and useful for most of my work, and really appreciate the selfless effort put in by its developers past and present. I like it primarily for its open source-ness, but as I reported in another email, I am puzzled by its new opaque (to me) way of storing the information about linked file which makes it not interoperable with other software. But, this email is about my problem with BD in conjunction with my workflow. My hope is that others who might have experienced similar issues might be able to advise me.
First, I *hate* Tex and anything to do with it. There, I said it. I know, as a scientist, I should like it, use it, evangelize it. But, I have no use for Tex in this day and age where I find Textedit to be more user-friendly and usable that Tex. This program is ridiculous -- it expects me to use ``and'' instead of "and"! Frankly, the modern word processors don't get in the way of my thinking, and in fact, the way stuff is formatted on most occasions helps me think better. Therefore, separating form from substance as being a strength of Tex is wasted on me. Seeing bold stuff in bold and italics in italics helps me think better about what I am trying to emphasize. In any case, this is not a flame-war, discussion about Tex. I just don't like it, and I have no use for it in the foreseeable future. I am sure it is the greatest thing since sliced bread for many others much better than me. I do like BD very much, which, sadly, seems to support a Tex-based workflow more than anything else. See, my workflow is messed up. I like writing up my raw thoughts in Scrivener. Scriv, however, can't "format" for crap, while it *can* do many other things. So, I take stuff from Scriv to Pages. Then I change stuff in Pages, and it is out of sync with Scriv. Of course, in the meantime, all my library is in BD, which is now not accessible from within Scriv (no more of that text input plugin) nor from within Pages. I can, of course, in the end, use Jim Harrison's excellent CiteInPages Applescript bundle, but I first have to go through the very cumbersome "switch to BD on my laptop screen, find the citation I want, copy its cite-key, switch back to Scriv or Pages, paste the code" process. Maybe, my fault *is* that I hate Tex. Maybe my life would be much easier if I just gave in to liking and using Tex and worked with it and BD. But, who wants to make thing easy, eh? I simply want to reduce the number of tools in my workflow (sometimes I just want to go back to using Textedit, and manual citation entry). I am now toying with either moving to Sente+Pages (still trying it out), or move to Zotero+NeoOffice. I know NeoOffice is atrocious in its performance, but it works very MS-Word-like (shudder), and its integration with Zotero is really very neat. Besides, Zotero is based on Javascript and SQLite, two tools I understand very well. Of course, I still have to figure out how to bring all my BD data into Zotero (as noted in a separate email, while I was able to import my library, none of the linked file info came through). Any advice from you writing veterans out there? -- 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/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
