Re: [xbiblio-devel] Mendeley Word and OpenOffice plugins

[Bruce D'A. <bd...@gm...>]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Steve Ridout <ste...@me...> wrote:

...

> There isn't an API at the moment, but this is something we'll consider
> doing, along with possibly open-sourcing the CSL formatting code. This would
> take a bit of work to create a separate dll and to remove dependencies on
> the rest of the Mendeley code but it would definately be good to be able to
> take advantage of a shared test suite. Do you think there would be much
> interest in an open source C++/Qt CSL formatting library?

What role does Qt play here?

I can't really gauge how much interest there might be specifically in
terms of, say, potential code contributors. In my experience, it's
hard to find skilled C++ programmers in this particular space.

OTOH, it certainly would be good if the code was available so that
this sort of processing could be more-or-less easily dropped into
environments like OOo, KWord, and Word. All are primarily C++
environments (and KDE also uses Qt). So I could imagine developers
from those sorts of communities might be willing to help out.

It could also show a good faith effort to tangibly contribute to the
success of CSL in ways that so far we have not seen from Mendeley*,
but which can have all kinds of not-so-direct benefits for your
efforts.

As Frank says, that's not the only way to achieve this (the test suite
is really important, for example), but I can't see any particular
value to you to keeping that code closed (notwithstanding the
additional work you need to get it suitable for wider use and
contribution), and a variety of potential advantages in opening it up.

Bruce

* E.g. it's great Mendeley is using CSL, but not so great that you
don't (at least the last I checked) really acknowledge it, or the fact
that you borrow a lot from Zotero's work. There are all sorts of
reason this can happen that may have nothing to do with conscious
design, but it's still not the best approach either for you, or your
users.