On 18.03.2008, at 15:42, P Kishor wrote: > 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?
Not much useful to add here: I share your feeling that BibDesk is much less useful if you don't use TeX. For me that isn't too big a problem since I think there's no better tool for writing long academic texts than LaTeX. That said, I will not try to convince you that LaTeX is better than any existing word processor. I also would certainly welcome it if BibDesk was able to talk better to the non-TeX-World (and in general I understand your sentiment that you want to reduce the amount of tools you use). The tools for this are here: BibDesk has a quite powerful template system, it has a template editor, and it can export RTF. We already had this discussion concerning BibDesk and Mellel (my favorite word processor): Someone has to do it. As I was told by both the BibDesk developers and the guys behind Mellel, such an integration wouldn't even be difficult to do, but someone has to do it. Adam and Christiaan are not interested in this, which is perfectly fine, so we have to wait until someone capable is. I said this earlier: I would gladly spend money for someone doing such an integration, but first we need someone. As for Zotero: There is work underway to make Zotero's data detectors work in WebKit (Safari's engine). See http://hublog.hubmed.org/ archives/001560.html . I don't know how far this is and when we can expect something, but this is not completely off. In theory, that would mean that BibDesk which already offers browser functionality could make use of all the clever website scrapers Zotero has. And there also is a tool which connects Zotero with BibDesk (http:// mackerron.com/ ). Add an entry to Zotero and it magically appears in BibDesk as well. This seems to be a bit flaky at the moment, it's not really working on my machine, but it's an interesting development. simon -- Simon Spiegel Steinhaldenstr. 50 8002 Zürich Telephon: ++41 44 451 5334 Mobophon: ++41 76 459 60 39 http://www.simifilm.ch „It will take time to restore chaos.“ George W. Bush ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
