Matthias, No offence is taken from fair comment and criticism.
I do not have much time as I have to go out soon. But I want to make a brief comment. I have also been frustrated that so little has been done to make even minor corrections and improvements to the existing bibliographic system. I have made many representations to many people in OpenOffice about his. My pet complaint, of about two years standing (issue 16268 June 2003), is that they would not increase the size of some the fields in the bibliographic database, even though a user can do this, if they know how in two minutes. But this has only recently fixed in version 2. And this is not even a code change but just values in table! The OpenOffice developers are disciplined and focused on the development schedule and bibliography is scheduled to 'OOo 2.O Later'. I could not change the schedule. Now that the Bibliographic project has been promoted to being a major project it may have more influence on the scheduling process (if we can work out how and when it is done). I personally have wanted to focus on the major enhancements, but on the project developers web page I proposed a several projects that would assist users of the current system. We just have not found the volunteers to do any of this work. Not even to to write some HOWTO documents about using the current bibliographic system! Maybe we should go through the list of enhancements and bugs and propose a list sorted by priority and try to get them rescheduled. regards David On Friday 25 February 2005 8:26 pm, Matthias Basler wrote: > Hi bibliographers, > > please apologice my a bit caustically tone, but OOo2.0 will be out in some > months. We are near the beta and I am tesing current snapshots and hecking > / sending issues quite frequently now. > > And where are we? > > No doubt, we have made up our mind quite intensely about an architectural > framework of the new OOoBib, have throughoutly discussed many details and > have proposed and tested several highly intersting concepts. > > But have the users of OOo1.1.x and OOo2.0 profited by this, so far. I > think, mainly not. :-( > > OOo2.0 will have a lot of new interesting features, some of which I believe > are or might be highly important, such as task bars, the OOo Base > application and - last, but not least, the new OpenDocument file format, > which hopefully will allow for saving complex references in a future > version of OOo. > > But OOo2.0 still has the same bibliographic functionality as OOo1.1.4 - > which is, as many users have remarked - simly not practically usable. (OK, > the bib. database standard field lengths have changed, but this could > already be done manually in older versions. If I have missed out some other > improvement, let me know.) > > Therefore I once again urgently plead, that at least some easy issues as > f.e. issue 29910 (http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=29910) > which concerns the insert citation dialog, get fixed before OOo2.0, just to > let the users know we care about the current OOo versions as well. > > I believe that even if OOoBib implementation should start after OOo2.0 > release (which I really hope), it will take another year or so to get > finished. In the meantime the users will have to use the current > bibliographic features. So these should get improved just so much, as to be > practically usable. > > I cannot do this: I still have no knowledge of C++ and have no > understanding of the current OOo source code. But if anybody of you could > get someone who has and ask him/her to fix simple things as the issue 29910 > mentioned above I would be very, very grateful. > > --- > > P.S. As a remark to David warming up the topic of a "standalone app". Yes, > I would like that too. Beeing realistic about who will code OOoBib (not one > of us probably, and neither me in particular) the Sun developers will > probably perfer to code it in C++ and probably (hopefully!) make OOoBib > something like the OOoBase application in OOo2.0, that is, a standalone > program with the OOo look and feel, which is closely interacting with the > other components as f.e. Writer. If I am not mistaken, OOoBib could use > exactly this architecture too. > > I know Martha wrote in the Architectural Design 2.0 > > > "A "database GUI" in a floating window that for Version 1 is called > > from within an OOoWriter document." > > but I would personally stronly prefer a standalone app similar to OOo Base > - which could then of course, without any problem, be called from within > Writer. (Having OOoBib in a Writer window and trying to separate it later, > would, on the contrary be much more difficult, I should think.) Anyway, > having OOoBib as a separate component will keep the architecture flexible > and the two programs Writer and OOoBib separate, which IMHO does improve > maintainability. (Plus the already stated advantage that a user does not > have to open a writer document, just to do maintenance work or to search in > his/her database.) > > Matthias Basler > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > This mail was sent through http://webmail.uni-jena.de > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
