[referencer] Translation and Keywords-to-Tags conversion

[John Spray]

On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 12:10 +0200, Frederik Elwert wrote:
> Since Referencer doesn't ship with a German translation, I made one
> (with the Italian mo-file as a template). I didn't find all the strings
> in that file, but I hope it's useful anyway, there are only few
> missings. What's the best way to get a recent pot-file? I'd complete my
> translation if needed.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there's been some duplicated
effort here -- over the last week or so a German translation has been
done on launchpad.net, which we recently switched to for translating
referencer.  Joachim Sauer did that one, perhaps you two could
collaborate.

> Until now, I added a Keywords field to my BibTeX entries to have some
> kind of tag support. That pybliographer doesn't support tags directly
> was the main reason for me to look for alternatives. Since the Keywords
> don't get converted into Tags during import, I wrote a little python
> script that takes a freshly imported reflib-file and adds tags according
> to the (space-separated) Keywords-list. I don't know if this is useful
> for anybody else, but now that I wrote it, I can share it anyway.

Are these keywords space separated, comma separated or what?  Could you
send a sample bibtex file (off-list if you prefer)?

> I have around 150 tags, since I used keywords quite a lot to structure
> my bibliography. This might be quite much and not really what tagging in
> referencer was made for. But I'd like to share some ideas that would
> make dealing with tags in referencer much easier for me. I don't know if
> it would help other people, too, so maybe this is just not the scope for
> referencer.
> 
>       * Alphabetic ordering of tags. Scrolling through a list of 150
>         tags is really horror when there is no ordering at all.

Agreed, sorting the tags is already on the todo list.

I'm a bit surprised that you have quite such a large number of tags: is
this a really massive bibtex file, or do you just tag very finely?

>       * Text-field for adding tags to a document. I'd really like the
>         preferences dialogue for a document to have a simple text field
>         into which I can type the appropriate tags as a comma-separated
>         list. When dealing with many tags, this is much easier for
>         frequently used tags then searching the list.

Nice idea.  The UI for tagging is undergoing some rethinking on my end
at the moment, I'm thinking to move more in the direction of a tag
browser in the main window, then add/remove tags in the context menu for
each document.  A text field for tags in the properties dialog would
complement this nicely.

>       * Ad-hoc hierarchy in tag list. This is quite a big feature
>         request, but a really useful feature, I think. Some applications
>         that support tags (like ccmixter.org) allow selecting more then
>         one tag to refine the selection (currently referencer behaves
>         opposite: When you select several tags, it performs a OR search,
>         not an AND search). Additionally, only tags that appear together
>         with the selected tag(s) are shown.
>         In a desktop app like Referencer, this maybe could be achieved
>         as an ad-hoc tree-view. Tags should be expandable and show tags
>         that exist together with them as children. A bibliographical
>         tool that I once used hat a feature similar to this, and I
>         really liked it:
>         http://www.winload.de/bilder/screenshots/47365/Bibliographix.gif

I believe that epiphany does something similar: I guess the algorithm
does something like recognising that certain tags are only found along
with others in order to recognise a hierarchy.  Could get quite
complicated, I think there would have to be some threshold (~30 tags?)
where this behaviour kicked in.

> This were just my first impressions using referencer, and I hope I
> didn't bore you too much...

Feedback is always appreciated.

Regards,
John