Re: Bibliography support (was: Google Summer of Code 2007)

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 09:39 +0100, Petr Tomasek wrote:
> I think abiword should not repeat the error of OO to
> create it's own bibliography manager _as_part_ of abiword
> itself, but rather develop general framework for
> any sort of indexing engines to be plugged into abiword.

+1

My reference manager[1] only supports lyx/latex because as far as I know
they're the only ones which have interfaces for this stuff. If a
similar interface existed in abiword I'd support it as fast as you could
write it.

> I think something similar should be possible as plugins
> for abiword, allowing 3rd parties to plug their bibliography
> managers etc. into abiword.

-1

Having a write an abiword-specific plugin would be suboptimal, if you
mean that in the same way that EndNote plugs into MS Word. This leaves
the referencing software doing all its own formatting, and having
separate code for every word processor it supports. The ideal thing
from my point of view would be if abiword/openoffice/koffice all
supported a common XML format. Standards for bibliographic metadata
exist: see Dublin Core or MODS.

http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/

I think that in order to see widespread 3rd-party support, an abiword
bibliography framework needs to take document metadata and format the
bibliography itself.

Regards,
John

1. http://icculus.org/referencer/
Received on Thu Feb 22 11:49:54 2007