[dev-biblio] Formula's in titles ?

[David Wilson]

A question that has come up in the Bibliographic project is - 'Would it possible to include a formula' in a title field (or a special title display field) to a bibliographic reference. It is clear that this is not possible now, but we are looking at what may be possible with a redesigned bibliographic interface. We would actually like to be able to use all the text formating options, bold, italic, underlining, super and subscripts, as well as formulas. This is of course of interest to mathematicians and chemists, and is something that LaTeX and BibTex supports now. Biologists want scientific names in italics. With my very limited understanding of the OOo formula system it would seem for us to achieve this the title text 'field' would have to be some sort of mini-document that was presented with the Bibliographic data entry UI that provided all the services needed by the text editing and formula API and formula UI modules. We would probably want to provide only a limited set of editing functions in this mini-document, for example we would not want new paragraphs in the title field. And whilst we want to able to insert formulas, we would not want graphics in the title. It would seem we would then have to store these in mini-documents with their titles including formated text and formulas - ie " The Significance of e=mc/2 to homo sapians" as a separate document with the bibliographic record ? If this was the case we would be using a similar approach to the formula system itself which stores the MathML xml in a coded directory in the save file. Do we need to store the whole document xml apparatus to get this to work. Or can we work with just bits of documents, stored and retrieved and presented to Bibliographic data entry UI ? How feasible does this sound ? Is there a better approach ? Any suggestions would be welcome -- ------------------- David N. Wilson Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic OpenOffice Project http://bibliographic.openoffice.org