On Jan 7, 2010, at 9:43 PM, david craig wrote: > >> you just need to stop abusing the global macro feature :). The entire >> point of it is to display macros that you do not want included in your >> database. > > More to the point, from the point of view of maintaining a single master > bibliographic databse that makes it easy to generate bibliographies for > individual papers, the whole point of THAT is not having to maintain > multiple copies of the same set macros.
There are too many uses of "that" in this sentence for me to figure out what you're saying, at least at this time of night. Do you want separate files or one big file? What problem are you really trying to solve? > It's not such a big deal to include that list in the same file as the > bibliography database, but surely it's not so hard to see why the global > macros feature might also make sense for this purpose, even if it is not > how you have learned to conceptualize it? I wouldn't say that I "learned to conceptualize" it; I'm fairly confident in saying that you're trying to abuse it, since I wrote the original implementation. Although it's improved in the last 4.5 years, I don't think the purpose has changed; it was designed to be complementary to the expansion of month fields. http://bibdesk.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/bibdesk/BibPref_Defaults.m?revision=1.11.4.2&view=markup&pathrev=TRY_CMH_CROSSREF_BR_1x > There is a practical reason for maintaining a separation between the > master bib entries and the macros. As an example, say one journal wants > full journal titles, another abbreviated ones. If you maintain two > parallel sets of journal title expansions, you can have BibDesk load the > set of macros you need from the appropriate external file before > exporting the group to an independent bib file. I'm confused again. You want a standalone file and also want to keep your macros in separate files? If you go with separate files, you're supposed to feed them to BibTeX for expansion in your .tex files, not have BibDesk expand them. Or do you want it to rewrite your .bib file with a different set of macros from the global macros? Again, this is not what global macros are designed for; they're a display/search convenience when you choose to use separate files. Having said that, there is some benefit to this type of feature for template users, but the global macro system is not the right place to handle it. [...] > Any of that make sense? I'm open to other approaches, but the simple > option I suggested in the previous email of including the option to > include global macros when exporting a group would be one way to take > care of it quite simply. Adding another context menu item and checkbox just adds more confusion to the interface. There is a standard way to save/export, and too many ways of doing the same thing leads to problems. Again, what problem are you really trying to solve, and why? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
