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

>
> > 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

I don't know how does EndNote plug into MS Word, but I think any
bibliography manager should do its own formatting, since this the
hardest part of any of such software to formate the bibliographic
citation according to various conventions/standards. In my understanding
this is the point which decides how good a particular bibliography
manager is.

And, as I mentioned above, there is also need for various indexing
capabilities, and all of these could be achieved through one
plugin API...

> 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.

I agree, that for representation of the data in .abw file an
standard metadata would be the best solution. But proper formating
is IMHO too specialized (if one wants to do it not just for english,
but also for exotic languages like arabic, hebrew, chinese, etc., that
may have quite different bibliography convetions) to be best handled
by a specialized application.

>
> Regards,
> John
>
>
> 1. http://icculus.org/referencer/

-- 
Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>