Re: text to bibliography?

On Aug 17, 6:47 pm, p0 <yves.dho...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Why would anyone ever need to "figure out" such a thing?

Well clearly you would, since you would add the code to your current
static text to convert it into a bibliographic source.

But why would you need to "figure it out"? (Oh, that's right, apps
don't come with instructions any more -- developers think they're
usable out of the box with no preparation.)

Your Papyrus example comes with over 500 pages of manual. Good luck in

I did not know that! I guess I found it highly intuitive.

convincing any user of reading even 25 pages before he can start using
a program, let alone 500. People just aren't patient enough anymore
for looking up things in a help file (see also my comment below on
creating new formatting styles).

No, tht's not it at all. You cannot use a "Help" file unless you
happen to know the exact name that the writers of the "Help" have
assigned to a feature/bug. Look how many times a day it is asked here
how to get rid of the dots between words, or why there's suddenly no
vertical space between the pages.

That aside, the bibliographic tools of Word 2007 lack almost all
documentation; the promised SDK is almost a year overdue now (I doubt
it will ever be released); and non of the people originally working on
the academic features seem to be still doing that job nowadays.

What's an SDK? You use their jargon, you must be one of them!

Have a look at the, alas, defunct Mac program Papyrus (it wasn't worth
the effort for the creator to adapt it for OS X, so he just offers it
as freeware to anyone with a "legacy system," but its discussion list
was still active back when I had to abandon the Mac, two+ years ago).

The setup of this tool is totally different, this is a tool for
storing and searching bibliographic information, even entire
libraries. As a side product, it also allows you to format the output
a bit. Microsoft's tool is intended only for providing formatted
output. They don't care about maintaining a library where you can find
stuff by keywords or authors or ...

But all this is besides the point, the original topic was about adding
textual sources to your document in an automated way. I have seen some
tools for converting BibTeX or EndNote files into Word 2007 sources.
And you can always create a converter which translates your home-made
format into Microsoft's format, but you can't expect Microsoft to
support your format by default. They have a format, and you either
stick to it, or you design something else (which is pretty easy using
custom xml). The choice is up to you.

I am not talking about "formats." I am talking about plain text, plain
text that looks exactly the way published bibliographies have looked
for about a century now.

And how do they look?

They look like what the Chicago Manual of Style says they should look
like, or a reasonable approximation thereto.

I would hate to be the programmer which gets "a reasonable
approximation" of the specified input and has to write a program which
takes that approximation and translates it into the desired output.

I gather from the comments here that the "Chicago" setting doesn't
exactly mimic, or duplicate, the specifications of the CMS.

Currently, my EndNote X1 style directory comes
with close to 3000 styles (2932 actually, but I have not downloaded
all available styles from their site). So this means, I currently have
3000 plain text versions of published bibliographies for a single
source. Are you going to write a converter which figures out which one
of those 3000 is used? Because you will have to before even starting
to parse the static text within one entry into a source.

Sounds like Microsoft-type overkill. Is that why the price is so
prohibitively high?

No idea about the price. But you can not blame EndNote for journals
and magazines not sticking to one worldwide standardized way to
display bibliographic data.

There was no need for "one worldwide standardized way" before there
were online bibliographies. Electronic catalogs were developed in the
1970s, long after each discipline and each major publisher had settled
down with its preferred styles. The LC format for library cards was
universally used in the US, but it contains and omits various
categories of information that are not coextensive with those used in
bibliographies.

It ought to come with a dozen or so standard output styles, and the
ability to combine the building blocks plus punctuation into any
additional styles one might encounter.

Even within the same scientific journal, bibliographies tend to be
formatted differently.

Not if the copyeditors are doing their job. (I was a Manuscript Editor
at Astrophysical Journal for two years.)

It doesn't seem too much to ask that "Text to Table" could come up
with a tabular presentation, which some other module could then
convert to the "format" used by the bibliographic database: if it
knows that col. 1 is the author, col. 2 is the date, col. 3 is the
title, col. 4 is the place, and col. 5 is the publisher (that's a
basic Book entry), why can't it simply do that?

Now you are no longer talking static text, you are talking (poorly)

"Poorly"? CMS has been around since 1906 and is by far the leading
style guide in the US.

If I would ask the medical doctors what the leading US style guide
would be, they would say AMA.
If I would ask the psychologists what the leading US style would be,
they would say APA.
If I would ask the legal people what the leading US style would be,
they would say Bluebook.
If I would ask the average school kid writing a little science paper
what the leading US style would be, they would say Turabian.

Gotcha. Turabian is based on Chicago (which she was the editor of for
50 years or so).

The other three probably do not predate 1906.

And if you would ask the rest of the world what the most commonly used
style would be, they would probably say Harvard (which is also the
oldest one if I'm not mistaken).

I'm not aware that a style called "Harvard" is used in the US. In what
publication is it codified?

I am not trying to say that CMS isn't important or widely used, it is
just that everybody feels that his or her style is the most important
and commonly used one while it isn't.

On a side note, of the above list, only APA and Turabian are supported
in Word 2007.

I've noticed that. Kinda leaves the humanists, who tend to use MLA, up
the creek.

formatted text. And you would have to have a tool to map columns to
fields, since in my case, year should be the last entry (except maybe
for pages) in mybibliographyand most certainly not the second.

So you don't do author-date references in the text? Fine. That would
be Chicago's "Humanities" style.

The style I use is not supported by Word 2007 at all. I did write the
transformation style*** for it from scratch.

And in your case, how is your book displayed if it is an anonymous
work? I would guess col. 1 is the title, col. 2 is the date, col. 3 is
the place, and col.4 is the publisher. So even between 2 entries of
the same type, the ordering of data would be different.

No, col. 1 would be empty. (Though there are circumstances in which
the author is entered as "Anonymous"; see CMS.)

And how do you expect your static text parser to guess that column one
is empty? Once you start adding delimeters, you can just as well use
the delimeters Microsoft defined. Those delimeters being xml tags.They
might not be what you prefer as delimeters, but they are delimeters.

I don't know what a "static text parser" is. Did you again forget that
I've put tabs between the fields, in order to do Text to Table? (The
punctuation between each pair of fields differs through each
paragraph, so it can't go by comma or period or colon.)

Maybe you don't have anonymous works, but it doesn't matter. What you
require is so specifc that you will probably be the only one using the
'import filter' anyway. The point is, Microsoft provides a set of
generic tools which works for 80% of their customers. There is no

You are again losing sight of the point. They provide _no_ tool for
going from an existingbibliographyto thebibliographydatabase.

The tools are there, they are just not obvious in use for the average
Word user.

You just recently told me that it's _not_ possible.

The format of a b:Source element is entirely defined by an xml schema.
All you have to do is write a (simple) XSLT which transforms your
format into the format described by that schema. Of course, if your
format happens to be an incomprehensible static text, your XSLT will
be very complicated. But you can not blame Microsoft for that.

I have no idea what a "b:Source element," an "xml schema," an "XSLT
schema," however simple or complex, or an "incomprehensible static
text" may be.

point for them in developing a tool which will work in a very specifc
case (yours) and therefore will target 1% or less of their customer
base. If you want one, you will have to write it yourself. They
provide a specifcation of thebibliographyformat and even provide a
programming interface (I have no experience with it). They try to help
you a long way, but the last few steps you will have to take yourself.

On the occasions when programming new reference styles has been
mentioned here, the MVPs have stated it appears to be impossibly
complicated to do so.

It is not. It is pretty basic XSLT, nothing fancy at it.

Like you said above, all people have to do is read the available
help:
* you have the open xml specification;

I do?

* you have blog articles by Microsoft people;

I do?

* you have MSDN articles describing the format (not extensively
though);

I do?

* you have 10 predefined styles, each consisting out of a couple of
1000 lines of XSLT code (that is over 10000 lines of example code)

That's an awful lot of code.

So there is plenty of information around. Maybe it is not perfectly
organized, but it is there if you want to learn how to use it.

But the MVPs are correct, as long as there is no point and click
solution, it is too complicated for the average Word user. And no
matter how much help files you are going to add, it will remain too
complicated.

Yet somehow I didn't find Papyrus the least bit complicated -- though
apparently it's too much for you??

I will soon find out how greatly it respects CMS style, especially for
complicated entries.

Well I never use the style, but since Word only defines one version,
and the Chicago style is different for different research fields, I
would not get my hopes up if I were you.

Since the 14th ed., CMS has had two different and parallel schemata,
the old humanities style, and the author-date style favored in the
social sciences. The U of C Press does little or nothing in hard
sciences that might need other provisions. (And the 15th has grown
intolerably permissive, perhaps as those who knew Mrs. Turabian --
unfortunately I never met her -- themselves retire.)
.