Re: [Bibdesk-users] pdf, from Safari to Bibdesk

[Maxwell, A. R <ada...@pn...>]

On 05/21/09 13:30, "Alex Montgomery" <ah...@me...> wrote:

> On 2009-05-21, at 10:48 AM, Gregory Jefferis wrote:
> 
>> On 2009-05-21 18:33, "Alex Hamann" <mai...@al...> wrote:
>> 
>>>> I have to say that I would really like to be able to do this ie do
>>>> the
>>>> equivalent of dragging the PDF file onto the top window in bibdesk.
>>>> 
>>>> I think that it might require
>>>> 
>>>> 1) Bibdesk App accepts dropped pdfs
>>>> 2) There is some way of deciding which bib file is the target of
>>>> the dropped
>>>> pdf if more than one is open.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> 
>>>> Greg.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> It is not clear to me what you would expect to happen? Do you want to
>>> autofile the pdf or are you hoping to extract the bibtex data from
>>> the pdf by dropping it on the BibDesk icon?
>> 
>> Extract DOI and use it to make a new bibtex record and then autofile
>> PDF -
>> which is what happens when you drop a pdf that contains a DOI that
>> can be
>> looked up on PubMed onto a bibdesk window.
> 
> Dropping on the BibDesk icon (or having Safari, etc. send it to
> BibDesk) should probably be treated consistently with dropping a text
> file: open up a new bibliography with the PDF attached to an empty
> record.

There are a couple of separate requests getting mixed into this thread, it
seems.  Christiaan already pointed out that you can't add an "Add to
BibDesk" item to a browser's contextual menu, since the browser has no way
of knowing what data underlies a particular link (web page, pdf file, text
file...).  
 
> If "open up one particular bib file" is set in Preferences, perhaps it
> could be added to that bib file instead.

Maybe, but what problem does dropping on the icon solve?  You can get the
same result without this ambiguity by adding a file or dragging a URL
directly to a BibDesk document.  BibDesk's interface and code already suffer
from too many ways to do the same thing, in my opinion.