BibDesk with Mellel?

[simifilm]

I brought the idea of Mellel integration up in the BibDesk mailing list, and at least one of the active developers showed interest. That doesn't mean that this will come immediately, but there definitely is interest. So if one of the Redlers is reading this, he might contact Adam Maxwell who is thinking about setting up a mailing list just for this kind of interoperability things.

[CabinEssence]

I'd recommend BibDesk to anyone -- no matter whether they use LaTeX or not. For me it's the best software for managing annotations, abstracts, and article and book PDFs, and that's a strong argument on its own.

[CabinEssence]

Maybe this script is of interest (Word and Pages? and possibly Mellel?? integration of cite commands):

http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/scripts/ ... BibTex.rtf

[simifilm]

Maybe this script is of interest (Word and Pages? and possibly Mellel?? integration of cite commands):

http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/scripts/ ... BibTex.rtf

I haven't tried this particular script, but IME the problem will that it relies on latex2rtf which has limited capabilities. latex2rtf is also used for the RTF preview inside BibDesk and the two styles I've used so far (first jurabib, now biblatex) weren't handled properly by it. There sure are some styles where this script will work, but it's no universal solution and still quite hackish.

[Ori Redler]

Currently, Mellel works in collaboration with Bookends and Sente. We'll try to address BibDesk with that too (this did not work well in the past, but perhaps this will change now). As for EndNote -- I believe that they are now working to implement a new method for entering citations into documents. When that work is finished, we'll be there too...

[adam]

Currently, Mellel works in collaboration with Bookends and Sente. We'll try to address BibDesk with that too (this did not work well in the past, but perhaps this will change now).

I (one of the BibDesk developers) am looking into this on our end. BibDesk's focus is on reference management (entering, storing, searching, browsing) rather than formatting for whatever bizarro style you want to use, and this isn't likely to change.

If we implement this interaction, the formatting will likely be limited to whatever our current templating system allows for output (RTF/HTML/XML), so much of the burden will be on the user to create useful templates. If you're familiar with our templating system, does this sound useful?

[simifilm]

Currently, Mellel works in collaboration with Bookends and Sente. We'll try to address BibDesk with that too (this did not work well in the past, but perhaps this will change now).

I (one of the BibDesk developers) am looking into this on our end. BibDesk's focus is on reference management (entering, storing, searching, browsing) rather than formatting for whatever bizarro style you want to use, and this isn't likely to change.

If we implement this interaction, the formatting will likely be limited to whatever our current templating system allows for output (RTF/HTML/XML), so much of the burden will be on the user to create useful templates. If you're familiar with our templating system, does this sound useful?

Oops, I thought I answered this long a go ... Anyway, it's very cool you're interested in doing this Adam. Being someone who uses both, LaTeX and Mellel, I'd love to see Mellel/BiBDesk integration. Using BibDesk's template system certainly wouldn't satisfy users who like a nice GUI, but it would already mean a tremendous improvement. I'd very much like to see this and I'm more than willing to beta-test this.

[simifilm]

Just wanted to let you know that BibDesk got a lot more user friendly, since it now has a graphical interface to create the output templates. Not all the functionality is available through the interface and everything is brand new, so there probably are glitches. You can check it out with the latest nigthly which is here.

At the same time, the export mechanism has been enhanced, it now handles "et al." and is able to do comparisons between fields.

As for Mellel/BibDesk integration. ATM none of the active developers of BibDesk is interested in doing this since none owns or uses Mellel. But Adam said that integration wouldn't be too difficult to do in principle and that he's willing to help with advice if someone is interested in doing this. Here is Adam's post from the BibDesk user mailing list:

I explored Mellel integration at one point, but I personally can't justify a license for Mellel to work on it, or the time it would require. If anyone is interested, I can share the Mellel SDK and some correspondence with its developers, and you can have your own subversion branch to play with. Join the developers list and we'll help you get started; that's how I learned Objective-C and Cocoa.

Note also that Pages's XML format is documented, so in theory you could scan a pages document and insert citations at the appropriate places. Tom Counsell's ruby script does this, for instance.

Maybe someone (not me!) could be persuaded to work on this via a grant? Anyone interested in pursuing that? I'd guesstimate 120 hours full time for someone familiar with Cocoa in general, maybe 80 for someone familiar with BibDesk itself; those figures are strongly dependent on the desired feature set. For my organization, that might translate to $12-18K at the low end, so students are probably a better bet for this.

I'm more than willing to pay my for share for this, and I'm also ready to set up a bounty system to collect money to pay someone who wants to implement this. But before I do that, we need someone capable and interested in doing it. So my question: Any experienced Cococa interested in doing this? And any users ready to pay for this?

simon

[Indi]

does anyone have experience with using the BibDesk bibliography management application? I have seen that mellel offers support for integration with sente and bookends. how can i make mellel operate with BibDesk?

Just a couple of months ago I started with Bookends, added Mellel, and somewhere along the way switched to BibDesk as my main reference manager. I find BibDesk's keywords and groups to be much easier to use than Bookends', and the reference window interface to be more flexible (for instance, you can choose which fields to display). However, as others have pointed out, BibDesk does not have the output-formatting power of Bookends, and is not meant to.

So, I collect all my data in BibDesk: import references, link PDFs, etc. When I am ready to start writing, I export the references I want to Bookends, and then write in Mellel, using Bookends to drag citations and create the bibliography. (I have had some hiccups in doing this transfer, but I'm gradually solving them.)

(One complication that might not apply to you: Sometimes I use a note-taking app before I am ready to move everything to Bookends. Since I need to put citations in these notes, I have made BibDesk's temporary citations match what I get from Bookends. Then I put citations directly from BibDesk into my notes. In this way, when I later move the notes into Mellel, the citations that also migrate are in the Bookends format so that I can use Mellel's "Convert Text to Citations" to change those citations into Mellel objects.)

The use of both Bookends and BibDesk is certainly more complicated than if only one of them was needed, but for me the overall ease of BibDesk is worth it. Other people may be using features of Bookends that I am not.

[ptram]

It has been some years since the last post to this thread, but I think a report of my experience with BibDesk could still be useful.

I collect my bibliography titles for a particular work in a dedicated folder in BibDesk. Titles also go in the general library, so that they can be reused for later works.

I created a template for the inline citation, and one for the note/bibliography full citation. So, I can copy titles from BibDesk and paste them as formatted inline text in Mellel. When finished working on the document, I copy all titles in my BibDesk folder, and paste them at the end of the document as full citations.

Scanning does not work, and cite keys are not "live", but I found this systems to work, at least on short documents (ten-twenty pages long).

Paolo

[macula]

I abandoned Endnote for Bookends a few months ago as part of a large-scale "clean up" of my scholarly tools and materials. I have found Bookends to be more flexible than Endnote in terms of accommodating various bibliographic styles (especially the footnote-based styles often used in the humanities).

In the meantime, I have been lured by (but have not migrated to) Sente, which boasts several attractive features:
- Its "graphical" style editor, for one thing, is vastly more intuitive than that of Bookends/Endnote, which is still text-based. I also like the hierarchical approach to style design adopted by Sente, in which basic recurring elements (e.g. "translators and editors") are defined and formatted separately.
- I have found Sente a hair better in accommodating fine subtleties of bibliographic styles (e.g. Bookends always places cited pages at the end of a citation, whereas in Sente the position is adjustable).
- Sente has a modern user interface that never hurts the eye, adheres to the design and usability protocols of the MacOS, and interacts with the user without surprises (e.g. I still can't get over the absence of MacOS-standard contextual menus (right-click) from Bookends data entry fields).
Yet at the same time, there is something charming in the "acrobatic", scruffy and improvised way that Bookends manages to get the job done in the end (and does so quite well, in fact, much better than that corporate beast that Endnote is). It evokes the enthusiasm and passion of the highly intelligent, talented, self-taught craftsman.

Despite these temptations, I am still not migrating to Sente. Not only because Sente is horrible at importing XML, losing lots of data in the process, but above all because Bookends comes bundled with the astounding technical support of Jon. Knowing that a response will arrive within a few hours is exceedingly reassuring at times of scholarly/professional crisis. Sente really has a problem in this department, by the way.

[DylanMuir]

That's a good point. I've always found the support for bookends to be nothing short of fabulous.

DRM