On Aug 15, 2010, at 18:54, Jonathan MacCarthy wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I hope you are all well. I'm writing with a question concerning
> importing from an external file group. I have a remote .bib file
and
> associated PDFs on Dropbox servers. With the public URL to the .bib
> file, I can add the library as an "external file group" in BibDesk
on
> my local machine, so that I can import references as I need them.
My
> problem is that I can't seem to import the PDFs also. What needs to
> happen so that the PDFs come with the imported references?
>
First of all, what do you mean by that? The linked files are just
links to
files, and those links are also imported. They will point to the
same files in
your dropbox server. Now if you want to copy those PDFs and replace
the links
with links to the copies, that's something BD will not do for you.
BD would not
even know how to do it, for instance, as a start, where should they
be copied
to?
> After a fair amount of searching, it seems that it has something
to do
> with the Bdsk-File-1 field.
That's some private data and an implementation detail, you should
never be
concerned with that yourself.
> The library on Dropbox is synced from a
> symbolic-linked folder on my laptop, if you're familiar with this
> trick. I'm hoping there's a simple solution.
>
> Any insight is very appreciated!
>
> Thank you in advance,
> Jon
>
There's no really simple solution. If not just because you did not
even have a
well defined question (see above).
Anyway, if, as I expect, you want to copy the linked PDFs to your
local disk
and want to replace the links in the imported items, I think the
best is to use
an AppleScript that goes through all relevant linked files, copies
the files,
and replaces the links.
Christiaan
Thanks for replying, Christiaan. Actually, that answers my question
perfectly! I didn't find an AppleScript that does something like
this, so I built my library into a webpage using the html export, and
adding the line:
<span class="Url"><a href="<
$localfiles.path.lastpathcompone...@firstobject/>"><
$localfiles.path.lastpathcompone...@firstobject/></a></span><br />
to htmlItemExportTemplate.html. This only works because all my PDFs
are in the same directory as the .bib and .html library. It just
links the local filename, removing the path (which has computer-
specific paths on it). Now, Dropbox is hosting a webpage of my master
library with PDFs.
Thanks again,
Jon
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by
Make an app they can't live without
Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge
http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
Bibdesk-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
