On 20 Feb 2009, at 6:45 AM, Douglas Stebila wrote: > On 2009-Feb-19, at 1:20 AM, Christiaan Hofman wrote: > >> Are you aware of the Web Group? > > > The Web Group is nice, but (a) does not fit naturally into many > people's workflow, and (b) does not allow for adding importers without > altering the BibDesk source code. > > On 2009-Feb-19, at 9:49 AM, Maxwell, Adam R wrote: > >> The short answer is no. A few sites are supported in the Web group >> that >> Christiaan mentioned, but there's no way for users to write plugins >> that tie >> into that group. > > It seems to me the natural way to do this right would be to have any > easy way of plugins that can be used either in the web group or can be > accessed by AppleScript, which then allows for easy scripts to be > written for Safari or Firefox or your web browser of choice. >
But indeed, BD does not live "inside" your browser. And I don't think BD should somehow go inside. The best I could think of would be some scripting support to tell BD to import from some URL. It's not completely clear to me what part of the process you'd want BD to perform. >> If you're using Firefox, you might be interested in this: >> http://www.mackerron.com/. It uses Zotero's scrapers to push >> references to >> BibDesk. > > I was not aware of Citeulike or Zotero. Since a lot of work has been > done by people in developing importers for Zotero it would be nice if > those importers could be adapted for more generic use outside of the > Zotero framework, but, after perusing the code, that seems unlikely. > It would be great if there was a standardized importer framework so > that importers could be written once and used in lots of programs -- > Zotero, BibDesk, etc. -- but that may be beyond the scope of what is > reasonable to do at this point. > I don't know too much about it, but the language that these importers use is very different from anything BD supports, so it would be very difficult / a lot of work to implement it. I never considered it very likely. > If someone more familiar with the BibDesk source code is interested in > this and willing to work with me on this, I am willing to put some > time into developing this. But I don't want to just go off and write > it without knowing that it fits within the vision the core developers > have for BibDesk. > > Douglas We've had some talk about writing importers in the past. At first Mike didn't think it was a good idea, because it's more manageable to write directly in BD code. However I think that was based on the assumption of a Obj-C plugin. I think it would be worthwhile to have a plugin mechanism for more general (scripting) languages, but only if it is well thought through beforehand (otherwise it will be a real PITA to work with it in the long run) and well designed. Moreover, I think also only if it supports various common languages, I'd say at least python. And I think here comes the pain, because communicating with any language other than AppleScript is still far from trivial from Cocoa. I wouldn't know how to do it. But for sure if someone does and wants to com in, I'd be happy to assist form the BD side. Christiaan > >> On 18 Feb 2009, at 6:29 PM, Douglas Stebila wrote: >> >>> 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 >>> >>> >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San >>> Francisco, CA >>> -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the >>> Enterprise >>> -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source >>> participation >>> -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source >>> code: SFAD >>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Bibdesk-users mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San >> Francisco, CA >> -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the >> Enterprise >> -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source >> participation >> -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source >> code: SFAD >> http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H >> _______________________________________________ >> Bibdesk-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San > Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the > Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source > participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source > code: SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _______________________________________________ > Bibdesk-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
