I largely different with Bruce, and encourage the development of Bibliographic applications that can effectively interact with OpenOffice. I differ from Bruce in not yet being fully convinced that we should abandon the idea of building a native integrated bibliographic facility in to OpenOffice.
However, whilst some Bibliographic enhancements ARE scheduled for OpenOffice version 3. ( http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Features ). There is no date set for this release, although I would hazard a guess for mid to late 2008. Also there is as yet no decision as to the Bibliographic features that would be included in that release. We know that the Writer development team has rather limited development resources and as a OOo Project. Thus third solution for a usable bibliographic facility now or in the near future. Currently there are complexities involved with Zotero and other 3rd party bibliographic apps in sharing documents and the related bibliographic data, which would be greatly reduced with an integrated bibliographic facility. Maybe applications like Zotero will solve these problems (they are being discussed on the Zotero development wiki) and if they can solve them then my desire for an integrated bibliographic application may well be weakened. Regarding "deprecate the existing citation and bib support ASAP", I have never considered it usable, and would be happy to see it gone. A list member recently pointed out to me that my first enhancement request that started this project #5038, "was filed 1999 days ago by yours truly" . and that it "makes me wonder if we'll see any working implementation before I retire (in about 15 years)." I have not yet given up hope. I urge all the list members to to contact any skilled developers that they know who may be interesting in working on this project. A couple of skilled and committed programmers could really accelerate this project. Otherwise we completely are at the mercy of the priorities and limitations of the SUN Writer development team. regards david On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: > > This brings up something I've been thinking about for awhile. I'm not > sure if David or others agree with me on this, but here's my thinking: > > The OOo bibliographic project started with the idea to replace the > integrated bibliographic component with something much better, but > still developed within the framework of OOo. > > For a variety of reasons, I think this is the wrong way to go. One of > those reasons is that the Zotero project has pretty much done what I'd > hope to achieve with OOoBib: > > 1) a rich data model and nice UI > 2) good import/export > 3) use of the CSL citation styling language > 4) integration iwith Word and OOo > > ... and so, finally a good, cross-platform application that is > suitable for a wide range of fields, including the social sciences and > humanities (where traditional tools often fail). I'm currently using > it for an article manuscript. > > I'd like to see this project, then, work on enhancing the integration > of tools like Zotero and JabRef with OOo. I'd encourage people, for > example, to get their hands dirty with testing, with trying to offer > support on places like the Zotero forums, and where possible to spend > time figuring out the code so that we can ensure excellent support > long-term, enhancements, and so forth. > > I'd ideally like to use this work to converge on an enhanced citation > API in OOo that allows for standardized integration (and encoding in > ODF 1.2) > > I'd also like to see other projects pick up CSL, but that's a somewhat > separate issue. > > So I'm basically suggesting a shift in focus designed to get stuff > working NOW, and enhance as we go. > > Thoughts? > > Bruce > > PS - Oh, and I think we should urge Sun deprecate the existing > citation and bib support ASAP. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ------------------- David N. Wilson Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic OpenOffice.org Project http://bibliographic.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]