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.

This project has three objectives -

• to build support with OpenOffice for the formating requirements of all of the commonly used style conventions.
• to develop a function which would enable the formate of a document to be changed form one style to another with minimal editing.

• to develop a function which would allow easy import and export of bibliographic data between OpenOffice and bibliographic databases such as BibTeX.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 -

• To develop detailed requirements to achieve the objectives.
• To check what existing OpenSource work could be of use - not reinventing the wheel.
• To encourage developers to help with the project.
• To gain an understanding of the implementation issues form the developers.
• To undertake detailed specification and design work.

• To work with the project managers and volunteers to get the development work done.

Areas of Work

• We shall need to decide whether we want to provide support for or utilise OpenSource bibliographic tools such as LaTeX/BibTeX, sixpack, bp, or pybliographer to work with OpenOffice (they could provide significant parts of the bibliographic functions). It would not be difficult to provide interaction with these applications (at least on Linux). Support for a pipe and some text conversion code would be required in order to accept citation input from these applications.
• Add a selection option for 'Document Style' to cover whole document.
• Adapt the current Bibliography Table Field editor for the bibliographic citation fields.
• Build support for the footnote and/or endnote citation methods.
• Provide for collections of bibliographic field definitions that are selected via a ‘Select Document Style’ option. Most of the styles are already defined in the BibTeX, but this is not a simple format from which to extract information.
• Develop the processing to handle citations and references for styles that require different treatment for first and subsequent uses of the citation.
• Develop the processing required to handle the conversion of one document style to an other.
• Develop a mechanism for transferring the internal Document Bibliographic entries to and from the database. Also to allow import and export from OpenOffice. And, most importantly, to support import / export of, or direct access to, BibTeX databases.
• An import filter for LaTeX, would assist users of that word processor to move to OpenOffice. The text conversion would not be difficult, but converting the mathematical equations would be a bit more tricky. (see issue )
• Some of the Bibliographic Database fields (Author, Title, etc.) need to be increased in length.
• Add symbols to the automatic footnote numbering scheme.(see issue)
• Develop a list of the Document Styles to be included, with details about each one.

• We need more information about bibliographic requirements from Europe and Asia. (We have info on German JURABIB & DIN 1505, and French UNIMARK & ISO2709)

Questions

• Should we persist with the current DBASE Bibliographic Database? Or, replace it with storage in BibTeX format and utilise other OpenSource work (code or design) for a BibTeX editor and browser? (For example see a screen-print of Sixpack application)
• When OpenOffice database project develops support for a SQL database, would there be any advantage of making use of it?

• Could we decode the publicly available Endnote (TM) style definition files, and make use of them?

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.