Is there a standard, simple way to write and install methods for
BibDesk to import citations from Safari/Firefox?
Here's the scenario I'm thinking of. Users are browsing the web in
Safari or Firefox and they come across a paper on a major site (arXiv,
Springer, IEEE, etc.) for which they'd like to import the citation
into BibDesk. It would be great if they could access an AppleScript
in Safari/Firefox, or switch to BibDesk and click a single button, and
have BibDesk parse the website, pull out the right bibliographic data,
and create a new citation.
Now, obviously having BibDesk parse all the data and figure it out
automatically is too hard. But one could write parsers for individual
websites that know the idiosyncracies of various websites. Indeed,
this is what a lot of the importer AppleScripts on the BibDesk wiki do:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/bibdesk/index.php?title=BibDesk_Applescripts
But this results in a lot of duplication of work and work being done
in a non-standard way. I think there should be (and perhaps there is
and I just don't know about it) a standard way of adding importers of
this form into BibDesk at runtime, and moreover that these importers
should be able to be written in scripting languages (AppleScript,
shell script, etc.) as opposed to having to be written in Objective-C
in the main BibDesk source tree. This would allow users to easily add
importers for their favourite websites without needing to know
Objective-C.
I've actually written such an extensible framework entirely in
AppleScript that has importer scripts for websites that I use (arXiv,
IEEE, ACM, Springer), so if you want to see what I mean a temporary
version is available for download at
http://www.douglas.stebila.ca/files/code/bibdesk/Importers-0.9.2.zip
I'd be happy to contribute to developing part of this if people think
it should be added to BibDesk, but I'm not a very good Objective-C
coder.
But I think this is functionality that lots of people will want and so
there should be one way to do it, not lots of people writing random
scripts and posting them in random locations.
Regards,
Douglas
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