[referencer] List view issues (was Referencer 1.0.4-pre)

[Frederik Elwert]

Am Donnerstag, den 31.05.2007, 18:45 +0100 schrieb John Spray:
> I guess the main difference between actual trees and an automatic
> tree-like display is that if the trees were specified by the user then
> he could have a situation where when he has
> 
> Mammal
>  - Dog
>  - Cat
> Fish
>  - Shark
>  - Goldfish
> 
> Then when he tags a file as "Shark" he gets the "Fish" tag
> automatically, rather than having to specify it by hand.

Yes, right, it also has it's benefits. But in my opinion, the automatic
tree display doesn't prevent this kind of things. If shark always
implies fish, then it's sufficient to just select shark. If you want to
have a look what you have about fish, and then refine your selection to
only match shark, then it's also possible. But your first-order tag list
gets longer if you don't have a pre-defined hierarchy, that may be a
disadvantage.

> Evil pybliographer user  ;-)

Hm, I don't think so. Pybliographer has some great possibilities, and
their development branch may become a first-class framework for managing
bibliographies in arbitrary formats. Maybe even referencer might benefit
from this one day, if support for more formats is planned. But currently
their GUI is lacking some love, and I'm just waiting for tag support for
too long. Now I can either hack it in for myself (which I might be able
to do some day, as I have at least some python knowledge), or I switch
to some promising project that already has this kind of great stuff (but
which I sadly can't help by coding, as I have no clue about C++) :-)

> Is the knowing which fields for which doc type the main thing that keeps
> you with pybliographer or is it other things?  I notice they have
> medline search which we don't have (yet).

I don't use medline. Z39.50 would be nice... ;-)
No, it's mainly the field selection. Manually add the necessary fields
is a bit odd. And one thing I really like is the automatic key
generation. You just fill in author and year, and it generates a key. So
"Henry Jones, 2003" will generate "Jon03", and if this already exists,
"Jon03b". That's nice, as keys as unique identifiers have a rather
technical meaning.

> The note field is used more often for things like @Unpublished entries
> with a \url, right?  Not sure it would be a good idea to populate it
> with annotation-type notes.

As I don't know all the details about BibTeX, I often take
        http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/formats/bibtex.html
as a reference. It distinguishes a note field for information that is
relevant in the bibliographic output, and an annote field that is not
used by the standard styles. Maybe it would be ok to use this one.
And for URLs, there is a (non-standard, but widely used) URL field.

But it might not be necessary to use a BibTeX field for annotations,
referencer can of course use it's own field for this. Or use external
applications. I don't know which might be the best way. Personally, I
use zim for longer abstracts that include formatting, so configurable
external programs would be fine with me... :-)

Cheers,
Frederik