Subject: abi with reference support
From: Ewan Birney (birney@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Sun Mar 25 2001 - 11:51:39 CST
I am a happy user of abiword for a year or so. I am still looking forward
to being able to do a full-circle word doc read-edit-write with my
collaborators so that I can stop bringing up vmware, but I presume this
will happen at some point...
I am looking to effectively replace my latex/bibtex system into something
little more ... modern ...
I wondered
(a) is putting in effectively EndNote (talking MSWord) or Bibtex
(Latex) support into abi-word a good thing? Is this considered
out-of-scope for abiword or not?
(b) has someone else tried and succeeded and I have not noticed or failed
for good or not so good reasons?
(c) assumming it is a good thing, is it doable? Is this a sort of plugin
to abi-word type thang, in whihc case is there a plugin architecture? If
there is going to be (or is a) plugin architecutre will it be via dlopen
style stuff or CORBA-bonoboo style stuff or something else entirely
(d) where do I start? I am watching abiword build from cvs and it looks
pretty sweet at the moment, so I can dive into the source, but where...
(e) this sort of thing requires perhaps two key abstractions
(a) abstract out the idea of a reference, put a placeholder at least
in the datastructure of the text and a placeholder for biblography
somewhere
(b) either user-driven directly or triggered on print/export etc,
trigger a sweep across the internal datastructure to number references in
the text and format biblography.
this means one needs hooks into (a) dropping in things in the text
datastructure which are more than just words and ideally can be opaqu-ish
data types and (b) have a module drive the formatting code in abi-word...
Anyway - this message is jsut a starting point - I have no firm
commitments to get this done - I am more interested at the moment about if
it is possible...
ewan
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Ewan Birney. Mobile: +44 (0)7970 151230, Work: +44 1223 494420
<birney@ebi.ac.uk>.
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