Some thoughts about referencer

[John Spray]

Hi,

CCing the list, hope you don't mind.

On Sat, 2007-04-21 at 13:40 -0400, Pan,Deng wrote:
> According to my experience of using latex and maintaining pdf files, i
> have some suggestions
> of the program, which i think maybe easy the users lives (at least mine ;-)):
> 1)  i do hope referencer to be able to search Pubmed database as
> pybiographic or endnote does.

I've had quite a few people request this.  I would like to see this
implemented in the future in a reasonably general way, to accommodate
z39.50 library databases as well.

> 2)  I found that when exporting to bibtex, it always export all the
> items.  I can not find a way to export only the items under a certain
> tag or selection. I think that would be helpful for mulit-projects.

There is a "Selection" option in the export dialog that should give you
the option of exporting only certain documents if you have made a
selection.

Somehow remembering which to export through a special tag might be
desirable, although I'm not sure it's a very important bit of
functionality -- why should it matter if there are extra entries in a
bibtex file?

> 3)  Maybe the program need a status bar showing some information, such
> as the number of items under the current view.

Yes, that would indeed be nice, and shouldn't be too difficult if anyone
feels like writing a small patch.

> 4)  If the program is able to add file or files directly to some tag,
> that will be great.   Now the process is to add them in the "untagged"
> and then to wait user to assign them.  But for example, when you
> import a bibtex file with tons of items of the same kind (i mean  i
> want to tag them with the same tag) , there will be a huge work to be
> done afterward.   Of course, if there is no untagged files, there
> would be no such problem.  But that needs the users to keep a good
> habit.

A workaround for this is provided by the fact that in the icon view the
documents are always sorted by the order they were added -- it should be
easy to select the last N documents and apply a tag to them all.

It would be nice to be able to do this in the way that you suggest,
could be done using a ComboBoxText in the bibtex import dialog, and the
same in the "Add files" and "Add folder" dialog.

> 5) maybe some thoughts about automatically generating keyword just as
> pybiographic does

Currently keys are generated automatically only when getting metadata
off the internet.  It should be fairly simple to add some UI to allow
the user to force this.  Ideally it would also include a way to
customise the format, with some kind of "<author><year>" type syntax.

> 6) the ability to find duplicated items as Endnote does. It can be
> based on a set of information fields (i think bibtex's definition
> about required fields for each kind of item is good)

Currently duplicate filenames are checked when adding files, but no
checking beyond this is done.  I guess it would need some kind of fuzzy
string matching to compare titles and authors etc.

All sensible points, thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
John