Bibliographic
Bibliography n, 1. a complete or
selective list of literature on a particular subject. 2. a
list of the works of a particular author. 3. a list or source
materials used or consulted in the preparation of a work. 4
the systematic description, history, classification etc. of books and
other written or printed works. - bibliographic,
bibliographical, adj.
The Macquarie Dictionary, (St. Leonards, NSW,
Australia: Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd, 1981)
Mission Statement
- A number of different style conventions are in common use for
the formatting of documents. These conventions use different formats
for bibliographic citations and for reference tables. At present
OpenOffice Writer provides support for only on of these conventions.
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This project has three objectives -
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If the project’s objectives were achieved, it would be
possible to convert a scientific, technical or academic paper to the
style required by a different journal, simply by selecting the
required style convention and then generating the new version.
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So far as I know, no other WYSIWYG word processor can do this. Some
(eg. Word for Windows with Endnote) may handle variations in the
in-text citations of the author-date / author-number types, but not
variations between in-text and footnote / endnote citations. [
wysiwyg -- relating to or being a word processing system that prints
the text exactly as it appears on the computer screen]
Background
- Many institutions require their documents to conform to a
specific Style Convention, which covers aspects of document format,
including the styles of bibliographic tables and citations.
[Citation: a short note recognizing a source of information or of a
quoted passage.] There are a number of Style Conventions: these
include MLA, ASA, PSA, Harvard, Chicago. These different styles
differ in the way in which they present citations and references for
different types of source documents, such as books, articles,
journals, collections etc. If a document has been written with one
Style Convention it is a laborious task to convert all these
references to another style. The ideal would be a fully automated
method of conversion. This project is working towards that.
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LaTeX, with BibTeX, is the standard word processor in mathematics
and the hard sciences. It can handle many types of bibliographic
style conversions. OpenOffice will have to emulate LaTeX/BibTeX's
flexibility in bibliographic styles (and in mathematic equations) if
it is to gain acceptance in that field.
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However, I believe that LaTeX / BibTeX can only handle in-text
citations eg. [dwilson:2002] / [dwilson:1] and not of footnote /
endnote citations. LaTeX is not WYSIWYG (even with it’s GUI
interface - Lyx).
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OpenOffice's current functions are limited. At present there are two
loosely coupled bibliographic facilities. One is the old StarOffice
5.2 Bibliographic database (dbase format). It has a simple reference
insertion process. When an database bibliographic entry is dragged
onto a document, a dialog box opens which allows the fields required
for the entry to be selected. This process can be configured for
only one citation format in one citation style - eg book reference
for MLA - and it does not support character formatting of fields,
such as italic or underlining. The bibliographic database cannot
import or export data in acceptable formats for other bibliographic
applications.
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The other facility in new in OpenOffice. It stores bibliographic
data within the document. The data is entered through 'Insert
>Indexes and Tables> Bibliographic Entry' function, and
bibliographic tables can be generated from it. The new facility can
also access the old bibliographic database. It allows Bibliographic
citations to be selected either from the bibliographic database or
from the ‘document content' and inserted into the document.
Selecting the 'From document content' option and pressing the New
button adds bibliographic references as hidden fields. A
Bibliographic Table can be inserted that utilised the citations from
the database and / or the 'document content' . The format of the
Bibliographic Table can be finely controlled (it has character
formatting) and this is a very good piece of design and
implementation. However, the citation and table field definitions
can be set up to support only one Style Convention. To reset the
table definitions for a different style is a laborious exercise.
Another limitation is that only the in-text author-date [wilson2002]
form of citation is properly supported: the footnote or endnote
citation style is not supported. Another important limitation is
that there is no capacity for in-document bibliographic data to be
imported or exported. Nor can data be transferred between the
internal document storage and the old database.
Project Summary
- As this project is just starting, the first steps are -
Areas of Work
Questions
More Details
- Link to a more
detailed consideration of these issues
Participation
First, subscribe to the bibliographic
mailing lists that interest you.
Next, please scan the archive of the lists you joined to catch up
on what's been discussed so far. To read the users archive:
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=dev
Then, you might consider introducing yourself, letting us know how
you found out about the project, what your interests are, and
anything else you care to share.
The originator of this project is David Wilson dnw@openoffice.org
Please feel free to subscribe and to tell to the community what
you know or what you would like to find in this project.