From: Henrik H. <li...@he...> - 2005-02-12 18:25:57
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I am just starting out using BibDesk, and it seems really impressive -- especially considering that I have been editing my bibtex files by hand up until now. There is, however, a couple of things that concerns me. I will address them both here, since they are related. I imported a .bib file that I had written myself, and I noticed that BibDesk will silently lose the month fields! I did some digging, and I realized that it is because of the way BibDesk saves the month field, namely, as month = {jan}, whereas I have always been saving my month fields as month = jan, without the brackets. The reason I am doing it this way, is that it is then up to the bibtex style file to chose how to typeset the month. For instance, using the 'plain' style, 'jan' will be converted to "January", and with the 'abbrv' style it will be "Jan." According to btxdoc.tex (which I believe comes with most TeX distributions) and also according to the LaTeX book, the three-letter abbrevation is preferred. What I find most problematic about this behavior is that BibDesk (silently!) loses my month field because it (incorrectly) thinks it is erroneous. I should get at least a warning, and preferably an explanation and an option to "correct" it. Of course, since my field is syntactically correct, it should accept it, (and BibDesk should itself store month fields in this format, IMHO.) :-). But in the larger scheme of things, I believe there should be safeguards to prevent silent changes like this in BibTeX files. On a similar note, I notice that several fields in the .bib file created by BibDesk are surrounded by brackets. It is certainly not needed that the year, volume, and number fields have brackets, and it might even be preferred (although I haven't found btxdoc.tex to address this.) Thanks for the great work! Henrik |
From: Adam R. M. <ama...@ma...> - 2005-02-12 19:40:31
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Hello Henrik, On Feb 12, 2005, at 10:25, Henrik Holm wrote: > I am just starting out using BibDesk, and it seems really impressive > -- especially considering that I have been editing my bibtex files by > hand up until now. Thanks, glad to hear it! > > There is, however, a couple of things that concerns me. I will > address them both here, since they are related. > > I imported a .bib file that I had written myself, and I noticed that > BibDesk will silently lose the month fields! I did some digging, and > I realized that it is because of the way BibDesk saves the month > field, namely, as > > month = {jan}, > > whereas I have always been saving my month fields as > > month = jan, > > without the brackets. This is a known bug at present (rather an as-yet unimplemented feature). BibDesk does not support macros, although work is in progress on this issue. I think Mike McCracken broke his PowerBook so he'd have an excuse not to work on this problem :). [...] > On a similar note, I notice that several fields in the .bib file > created by BibDesk are surrounded by brackets. It is certainly not > needed that the year, volume, and number fields have brackets, and it > might even be preferred (although I haven't found btxdoc.tex to > address this.) Interesting. Unfortunately, there is really no documentation as far as what BibTeX itself will actually support, and people have come up with many variations in the syntax that are really difficult to support (or guess at)...such as key="value" is equivalent to key={value}. -- Adam |
From: Alexandre E. <aen...@in...> - 2005-02-13 09:12:56
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Ok, this is rather weird... It seems BibDesk may save an invalid file that it can't open again. Did some "Cited Reference" searches on Web of Science. Exported directly to Endnote (ISI format, file uml_view.cgi). Saved as RIS. Change extension to ".ris" and double-clicked. Opened in BibDesk and imported automatically (great functionality!): works fine (surprising after several failed attempts). Save as a .bib file. Edit in BibDesk, saving once in a while. Saved and closed. Came back to the .bib file file later: causes errors, BD can't import it. Pressing "Edit" doesn't show specifc errors. Eventually found out that BD had added "fields" to the references, based on information present in the original "N1" fields of the RIS file. For instance, "0920-9034" as a line in the RIS apparently became "0920 = {034}," in the .bib (which causes BD to choke). (For this one, the original ISI field was "SN 0920-9034") Most of these extra lines started with number runs so it was possible to do a perl replace (using TeXShop's greatly enhanced search and replace dialog) but one line was still causing BD to choke. (Had to diff. Turns out the ISI's "ID WEST-AFRICA; 19TH-CENTURY; CARTOGRAPHY; TRAVEL" got converted into RIS "KW - West-africa \n 19th-century \n cartography \n travel" which BD transformed into " 19th = {entury cartography travel}," and choked) After cleaning up the .bib *created by* BibDesk, BiibDesk was able to open it again. Now that the .bib is clean, it opens correctly every time. The most troubling part of this isn't really that BD chokes on invalid fields or that it doesn't say which lines cause it to choke. That's all to be expected. But BibDesk happily imported a file, allowed that file to be edited and saved, and then refused to open it again. Not good. :-( It might have to do with the RIS import procedure (which is already a blessing but might not be supported). Still, shouldn't BD somehow check the file it saves? Unsurprisingly, BibDesk may choke on importing a file which has quotes within an abstract, at least if using the BibTools conversion scripts (which have an XML intermediate format). At the end of the day (did take a while), the file is now correctly imported and apparently safe. It's sure nice to have a .bib file out of this... Thanks! Alex |
From: Armin G. <gor...@ma...> - 2005-02-13 14:51:16
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Hello, I am new to bibdesk and I tried to use the "Export to rss" (I think it is a really nice feature). I understand, that you have to specify which information you want to be given in the description field of the rss. I don't want to write an RSS-description for every entry but I'd rather like the field to contain the information you would also cite writing in an article (i.e. author, title, journal). In the rss preferences pane I can specify something in the "Other" field. It works fine if I only want to have the author or title. But how can I specify more than one item and control the output style? I am not an expert, so this might be a trivial question, but I didn't find a solution on myself, although I checked the readily available web sites. Thanks Armin |
From: Michael M. <mic...@ma...> - 2005-02-16 09:44:32
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Hi Armin. Unfortunately the answer is that you can't easily do what you want to right now. I will definitely keep this in mind for a pending rewrite of the rss export feature. If you or someone more familiar with the applescript interface is willing to give it a try, you could probably write a script that would set Rss-Description to whatever combination of the other fields you want automatically. Thanks, -mike On Feb 13, 2005, at 6:51 AM, Armin Goralczyk wrote: > Hello, > I am new to bibdesk and I tried to use the "Export to rss" (I think it > is a really nice feature). I understand, that you have to specify > which information you want to be given in the description field of the > rss. I don't want to write an RSS-description for every entry but I'd > rather like the field to contain the information you would also cite > writing in an article (i.e. author, title, journal). In the rss > preferences pane I can specify something in the "Other" field. It > works fine if I only want to have the author or title. But how can I > specify more than one item and control the output style? I am not an > expert, so this might be a trivial question, but I didn't find a > solution on myself, although I checked the readily available web > sites. > Thanks > Armin > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide > Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real > users. > Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click > _______________________________________________ > Bibdesk-users mailing list > Bib...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users |
From: Adam R. M. <ama...@ma...> - 2005-02-13 15:49:39
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Alex, Firstly: which parser are you using within BibDesk (in the Files preferences, lower radio button)? On Feb 13, 2005, at 01:13, Alexandre Enkerli wrote: > Ok, this is rather weird... > It seems BibDesk may save an invalid file that it can't open again. > > Did some "Cited Reference" searches on Web of Science. Exported > directly to Endnote (ISI format, file uml_view.cgi). Saved as RIS. > Change extension to ".ris" and double-clicked. Opened in BibDesk and > imported automatically (great functionality!): works fine (surprising > after several failed attempts). Please send me (off-list) the original RIS file that you opened. Also, failed attempts to open RIS files are bugs, and need to be reported. > Save as a .bib file. Edit in BibDesk, saving once in a while. Saved > and closed. Came back to the .bib file file later: causes errors, BD > can't import it. Pressing "Edit" doesn't show specifc errors. > Eventually found out that BD had added "fields" to the references, > based on information present in the original "N1" fields of the RIS > file. For instance, "0920-9034" as a line in the RIS apparently > became "0920 = {034}," in the .bib (which causes BD to choke). (For > this one, the original ISI field was "SN 0920-9034") Was it then SN - 0920-9034 in the RIS file? > Most of these extra lines started with number runs so it was possible > to do a perl replace (using TeXShop's greatly enhanced search and > replace dialog) but one line was still causing BD to choke. (Had to > diff. Turns out the ISI's "ID WEST-AFRICA; 19TH-CENTURY; CARTOGRAPHY; > TRAVEL" got converted into RIS "KW - West-africa \n 19th-century \n > cartography \n travel" which BD transformed into " 19th = {entury > cartography travel}," and choked) It looks like there are some possible problems in BibDesk's RIS code, unless BibUtils spit out bogus RIS. > The most troubling part of this isn't really that BD chokes on > invalid fields or that it doesn't say which lines cause it to choke. > That's all to be expected. It should give you the offending line of the file; did you see the error panel come up, with specific error messages? If you click on a row of that little table, you'll be taken to the problematic line in the file. > But BibDesk happily imported a file, allowed that file to be edited > and saved, and then refused to open it again. Not good. :-( > > It might have to do with the RIS import procedure (which is already a > blessing but might not be supported). Still, shouldn't BD somehow > check the file it saves? The check is from opening the file. Saving is a simple operation, because it can be relatively expensive; further, the only way we have (at present) to validate the file is to re-read it. > Unsurprisingly, BibDesk may choke on importing a file which has > quotes within an abstract, at least if using the BibTools conversion > scripts (which have an XML intermediate format). Depends on which parser you're using and how the fields are delimited; if each field is given as key={value} rather than key="value", you should be fine with double quotes if you use the experimental parser. I don't recall what btparse does with these. -- Adam |