Christiaan & Greg,
Sorry I'm slow getting back to you on this.
Extracting a DOI from a PDF is never fool proof, and moreover some
PDFs (scanned PDFs) don't contain text, only images.
I realise: I wasn't complaining, but summarising for background.
Other software that tries to extract DOIs suffers similar problems.
When I investigated that software (some time ago) I found that the
issue was mostly the parsing / discovery of the DOIs. The way the
journals present the DOIs in the text isn't very consistent and you
get the impression that they never thought that they might be
scanned-for computationally; perhaps this is something the DOI people
need to attend to? Ideally the DOIs would be in a header field, under
a standard tag, not embedded in the text for parsers to try dig out.
BibDesk gets the bibliography information from NCBI using their
documented query methods, but this apparently drops diacritics.
OK.
It
seems that they also provide an XML format that retains the
diacritics, but we don't know yet what syntax they use. Documentation
about that is extremely sparse and unreadable. So perhaps in the
future we will be able to use that instead and import diacritics.
It might be easier to ask NCBI if they could provide an option in the
existing methods that returns the information with the diacritics
intact. There is no harm in asking and they do sometimes respond to
this sort of thing. I will send a note to them, but I think it is
more likely to result in action if they get something from someone
representing the project and who is familiar with the scheme they
provide. (Email [email protected])
I know you mean about the NCBI documentation. (Been there myself for
other things they release.)
Seeing I can't use BibDesk for this, is there any other solution I
might use? Command-line solutions are fine. (Well, provided they are
documented!) Perhaps NCBI has "example" code using their XML-based
alternative?
Thanks,
Grant
Christiaan
On 30 Apr 2009, at 9:44 AM, Grant Jacobs wrote:
Synopsis: I am looking for a way of obtaining the title, name, etc.
from PDFs that retains the original diacritics in the names, titles,
etc.
I hope there is a simple solution to this that I have overlooked.
Background:
You can create new bibliographic entries in BibDesk by dragging PDF
files of articles (scientific papers in my case) to the main window.
I presume what happens is that BibDesk extracts the DOI from the file
and uses this to obtain the information (authors, title, abstract,
etc.) from the internet. This is an excellent feature, even though it
isn't foolproof: it sometimes seems to simply fail despite there
being a DOI in the article.
Problem:
However there is a catch! Despite BibDesk being able to handle
diacritics (the accents or cedilla added to letters in some languages
to indicate pronunciation differences), these are "dropped" somewhere
along the way and the resulting bibliographic entries lack them.
A little testing:
This seems to apply to all articles. I've tried different journals,
and it's always the same, no diacritics.
The articles at Pubmed or the original sources the DOIs point to have
the diacritics in the author's names, etc., despite that the the
downloaded information obtained from the DOI has stripped them out.
Queries:
Is it that once the DOI information is obtained, the characters are
"reduced" to their "plain" ASCII equivalents?
Is there some option or something that I need to set to enable this
to stop happening so that I might receive the names with their
diacritics? (Or, rather, the internally corrected form; I understand
that internally they are mapped into LaTeX equivalents.)
> Grant
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