On Aug 31, 2010, at 11:49, Christiaan Hofman wrote:

> Also, opening a file is a very different action from trying to interpret 
> dropped data, with lots of different requirements.

To expand on that a bit: the file's type and conformance with syntax are 
assumed when the file is opened; in this case, if the file name ends with .bib, 
it is assumed to be valid BibTeX, and is fed directly to the parser.  All 
syntax errors (including missing cite keys) are then dealt with in the same way.

Text data on the clipboard has no type associated with it, so BibDesk uses some 
heuristics to try and figure out what it is.  There's more latitude in this 
case, since you're already relying on content-sniffing before parsing, so 
BibDesk takes that opportunity to deal with common types of malformed data.  
This isn't safe to do in the normal document-opening-from-Finder path, though; 
it's slow, and there are various ways it can fail.

Incidentally, this is part of the reason I recommend RIS over BibTeX when 
importing from online sources; we put a lot of work into ensuring that 
BibDesk's conversion from RIS to BibTeX gives syntactically and semantically 
correct data.  Publishers' so-called BibTeX output is often lacking on both 
counts!

-- 
Adam

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