Re: [Jabref-users] couple of JabRef questions

[Morten O. A. <mo...@bo...>]

> 1) Is there an "import plaintext" feature to create a new entry based
> on the text user types or pastes into text entry form.
> 
> This would be extremely simple and yet very powerful.
> I think JabRef might already have such feature, but if not, it would
> be very good to have it.

There is a "New entry from plain text" dialog (in the BibTex menu), 
where you can paste an entry, and then assign the various parts to their 
correct fields. Automatically assigning fields from arbitrary text is 
probably next to impossible, but this dialog makes it easy to do it 
manually.

For importing formatted entries we will be introducing an import 
function that tries to automatically detect the import format - so you 
don't have to know which format an article database exports. This should 
save some time for users.

> 2) Alternatively there could (or maybe already is) be a feature -
> "Extract all BibTex from this HTML source" which I could feed an URL
> from CiteSeer, DBLP or other reference database bibtex entry and get
> the bibliography entries created in the database.
> 
> This does not differ much from the previous (as copy and paste from a
> web page is a very easy thing), but some users may prefer this as an
> easier way.

This is probably worth a try. Fetching the information from a given url 
and handling it to the autodetecting import function should take about 
10 minutes to implement :-)

> 3) Right-click context menu when clicking on an extry has everything
> except for 'Delete'.
> Might be useful as well.

Good point. "Cut" will usually do the trick, but there should be a 
"Delete" entry as well.

> Links and maybe adding some personal notes are probably only things missing.

For links, I can see the usefulness, but how can the users obtain this 
information? I can't imagine users trawling the reference lists and 
manually create links to those referred entries that are in their own 
database. And each new entry would demand a new cross-examination to 
keep the links updated. Are there web resources that can automatically 
provide this information in a way that JabRef could import?

For personal notes or quotes, this was in fact something I considered a 
while ago - allowing each entry to have a list of comments or quotes. I 
never had time to address it, but I think it is a good idea.


--
Morten