On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Ian Mulvany <[email protected]> wrote:
> Although not specifically related to CSL, I was wondering whether > people on this list had opinions about the tools currently available > for creating bibliographic citation styles. > > This week I tried the tool available in EndNote X5 and the tool > available from Wizfolio. > > Have people on this list tried these tools, what are the strengths and > weaknesses? > > What tools represent the state of the art? MakeBST. OK, I'm (only partially) joking. I was an Endnote user way back about 15 years ago, but I honestly doubt their citation style UI has changed much since then. Strengths: They have a style editor that allows users to modify their styles without too much hassle (much less hassle for non-tech-savvy users than hand-editing CSL files). Weaknesses: In summary, the styles aren't very good, and they're tedious to create. - had an awkward syntax difficult for me to remember (for things like grouping and such) - type-based approach meant styles were kind of brittle (every type needed to be fully-specified for formatting to work correctly) Any editor I've seen (save for MakeBST) has adopted this basic approach: simple type-based templates. I think the problem with it, aside from what I note above, is that it forces users to get too far down into the weeds. In this sense, the approach is too complicated and time consuming. OTOH, the other limitation is that the styles themselves become too simple (because complex operations like substitutions become difficult or impossible to represent). To put this another way, I'm not aware of any significant evolution in these UIs: the state-of-the-art is where it was 20 years ago. But admittedly, I haven't paid close attention. My hope is this editor can create (or more likely, to help users find) better styles more quickly. Bruce ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ xbiblio-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
