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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    KCite (was Re: Modifying KWord files / Interaction with KWord)
From:       Claus Wilke <wilke () caltech ! edu>
Date:       2001-04-26 5:56:27
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Since the mail ended on the list, let me make some comments ;-)

>
> Do you know of a good way to define the citation formats used by the
> individual journals? I find the format EndNote uses a real pain, and often
> was not able to get what I really wanted, especially for book sections when
> sometimes you have book series, sometimes there is an 'Edition' field
> etc...
It is very important to have an extremely powerful generator for the citation 
formats. The number of different formats that might be required in different 
circumstances is mind-boggling. In particular, under certain circumstances 
(law texts in particular) one wants to use things like 'Ibidem' if the 
previous citation and the current citation are identical, or 'supra' if 
something has already been citated before. These things need a considerable 
amount of algorithmic power in the format generator.

I have no experience with EndNote, but I kind of like the BibTex philosophy, 
which is: "Writing styles is hard, but the determined mind can do anything". 
I think it doesn't matter if some programming experience is needed in order 
to create a nice style, since most people will use standard styles anyway. 
You should probably use some kind of plugin approach, where the plugin is 
'real code' (C++ or perl or whatever). One particular plugin could work with 
more simple configuration files, to cover 90% of the standard situations and 
give some configuration freedom to those who cannot write their own styles.

>
> Once the program is more advanced, it will need some more import filters
> for other data bases (I already wrote one for ISI-Web of Science, and one
> for Biological Abstracts and Biological Previews). The import filters are
> external programs (I used Perl scripts, but they can be any executable
> file)... I certainly also want a BiBTeX import-/export function... The
> program would then also be useful for the people using LyX.
>

You get BibTeX import (almost) for free from btOOL: 
http://starship.python.net/~gward/btOOL/
It's a C library with perl frontend to parse BibTeX. All you have to do is to 
run your BibTeX file through that library, and you get a nice datastructure 
from where you can easily transform the data into your own format. The only 
problem that remains is that BibTeX files often contain LaTeX markup, so you 
would have to run the single entries through a LaTeX filter afterwards.

Best,
  Claus 
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