Hi David,
Thank you for your detailed response. I am delighted to hear that the
current proposal is so well rounded. I have inserted some of my ideas
between your paragraphs below -- just some feedback from my perspective.
Clip,
As I understand them, the current proposals for the OOo Bib Project would
allow for the selection of and retention of disparate fonts and font sizes
within citation and citation prefixes and suffixes. Each of the citation
elements author name, title etc, would be in formatted text field - that is a
field that would allow any formatting that a text document could have,
including embedded formulas, graphics etc. and would include font selection
down to the character level.
This is excellent. I hope an efficient UI (preferably formatting styles
based) will compliment this versatility. To be more clear: hopefully the
user will be able to define a 'catalogue' of styles to be able to quickly
apply them to a selected section of text (even in the bibliographic
component). [I posted some initial UI ideas to the Zotero thread wrt one way
of making this efficient, user friendly and future-proof]
A difficulty arises when you want to export this highly formatted
bibliographic data or try to integrate with a third-party package like
Zotero. To deal with the complex text formatting Zotero would have support
most of OOo Writer's text formatting functions itself ! which is clearly not
feasible. It could called on OOo services to display and edit the citations,
(and a similar process for MS Word) but then you have the all the problems
with conversion of WP formats and exporting or using your bibliographic
database to a machine with no compatible WP. Zotero would cease being a
standalone package. If Zotero wanted to implement some font and character
formatting it could pass this text to OOo Writer or MS Word in HTML or RTF
formats.
I personally would favor the last mentioned approach. Another option, from
my non-dev. pov, would be to allow OOo to import (and update > so as to keep
synchronized) the Zotero DB (perhaps just the citation data -- somehow
translating Zotero's formatting 'markup') and thus allow the user to use OOo
bib. tools for the specifics in OOo. This would allow the user to choose
between using a Zotero plugin or OOo's native bib. tools. I think such
flexibility would be welcomed.
A partial solution to the Zotero OOo Writer integration might be that when the
user inserts a Zotero sourced citation (in a simple text string format) the
user can then do the complex font modifications to the text in Writer, and we
try and make the database update function 'intelligent' enough that in
updating it attempts to maintain the user font/character formatting. Which
could work if the database changes were small spelling corrections, but
changing the word order and spelling of your Greek and Aramaic words might
defeat such an update system and the user would have to do manual
corrections.
My initial reflection on this would not favor such an approach. A "just
works" (insert > forget > updates do "the right thing") approach probably
requires an unwavering source-to-final-draft consistency. For example:
updating/fixing/restyling the citation data in Zotero should smoothly
(without any further user interaction) carry forward into the appropriate
sections of the Writer document (when it is updated -- whether this is
handled by a Zotero Plugin or by importing/updating the Zotero DB into OOo
bib. tools). My thinking on this is that allowing flexibility in terms of
post-insertion formating is detrimental to the user in the long run: not
only are the relevant changes not sent 'upstream' (and thus the user must
necessarily remember not to forget reformatting each insertion occurrence)
but any significant changes in citation style will force the user to
reformat all affected citations. The final weakness occurs in the scenario
where at some point past the initial final draft the user wishes to exchange
one of the fonts used for a particular non-Western script for another (so as
to appease another journal or a new font formatting requirement).
Consequently, all of the needed formatting must be permitted at the source
and updated there. Hope that makes sense ...
All the best in your OOo endeavors,
clip.
regards David
--
-------------------
David N. Wilson
Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic
OpenOffice.org Project
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org
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