Posted by: kirkjobsluder
on October 07, 2004 01:40 AM
I find it really interesting how whenever someone mentions a key issue with OOo that someone asks, "have you looked at...". The answer is, of course I've looked at it, and spent a large chunk of my time contributing a needs analysis for the project.
The biblographic feature of OOo is flawed in many ways: * Bad handling of author names in ways that prevent automatic handling of bibliographic styles. The current database structure does not recognize familiar and formal names or multiple authors. This is critical for bibliography styles for the social sciences and humantites where you might need to produce (Doe, et al,; 2004), or styles where the order of familiar/formal names might be changed in the same citation. (Doe, John and Jane Wilson).
* Limited field width.
* The facility for creating bibliographic styles is awkward, and underdocumented.
* At least with my last attempt at getting the database to do something that might possibly be close to APA, I found that while bibliograhpy formats stuck with the document, you can't save the bibliograhpy format in a template for later use.
You can find a full list of issues at: <A HREF="http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/" title="openoffice.org">the bibliographic project incubator</a openoffice.org>.
Perhaps even more frustrating, Endnote abandoned RTF document scans for version 7 (although they have replaced it in version 8). So for a while there was a distinct "can't get there from here" problem with the bibliographic features. Not only were the existing tools incapable of rendering some of the more complex styles, but you couldn't use the leading tool that could. With a solution not in sight until long after Version 2.0, I'm looking back at BibTeX for future writing projects.
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Re:All depends on your market (required solution)
Posted by: kirkjobsluder on October 07, 2004 01:40 AMThe biblographic feature of OOo is flawed in many ways:
* Bad handling of author names in ways that prevent automatic handling of bibliographic styles. The current database structure does not recognize familiar and formal names or multiple authors. This is critical for bibliography styles for the social sciences and humantites where you might need to produce (Doe, et al,; 2004), or styles where the order of familiar/formal names might be changed in the same citation. (Doe, John and Jane Wilson).
* Limited field width.
* The facility for creating bibliographic styles is awkward, and underdocumented.
* At least with my last attempt at getting the database to do something that might possibly be close to APA, I found that while bibliograhpy formats stuck with the document, you can't save the bibliograhpy format in a template for later use.
You can find a full list of issues at: <A HREF="http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/" title="openoffice.org">the bibliographic project incubator</a openoffice.org>.
Perhaps even more frustrating, Endnote abandoned RTF document scans for version 7 (although they have replaced it in version 8). So for a while there was a distinct "can't get there from here" problem with the bibliographic features. Not only were the existing tools incapable of rendering some of the more complex styles, but you couldn't use the leading tool that could. With a solution not in sight until long after Version 2.0, I'm looking back at BibTeX for future writing projects.
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