Re: text to bibliography?

On Aug 18, 5:23 am, p0 <yves.dho...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I tried to move my cursor to the next spot, and my Reply sent itself!

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.

Not really, Word 2007 supports MLA out of the box.

Since I don't have the box yet, how would I know that?

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.)

Static text is text without any kind of markup or delimeters
indicating clearly were fields start and/or end. It is what you would
call text without any codes.

Once again, you want to use your tabs, Microsoft wants you to use
their tabs, their tabs being the xml tags I showed earlier. It is not
because their tabs are longer than yours (and a lot more descriptive),
that they are worse. It is all a matter of taste.

And if they are n characters long, they take n times as long to type.

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.

It is possible, I showed you which tags to use in the simple example I
gave in one of the previous posts.

That's not a tool. That's handwork that might not be inconvenient if
one had a grad student handy to do it. (My first job in Chicago was
retyping pages of a professor's book ms. each day to incorporate the
changes he'd made the previous day. Fortuntely it's a catalog of
cuneiform texts so each entry began a new ms. page.)

However, to automate the entire process, the input format has to be
perfectly known. That is, no single exception can be left aside
(anonymous works, corporate authors, ...). Once you have fully defined
your format, all you have to do is provide a mapping between your
fields and the fields defined by Microsoft.

So is it possible to do it in an automated way? Yes. Is it doable? No.
There are so many versions of every style format that your
'translator' would be either just working in your specific case, or be
a huge monster which takes years to make and would even then not cover
some exceptions. Microsoft decided not to create the monster (and I
can't blame them). Instead, they decided to give you the tools to
create your translator for your specific case. But for someone without
any programming skills, those tools are too hard to use.

Q.E.D.

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.

And that is the main problem. I do not blame you for not knowing them.
But they are available to you. If you want to learn how to use them,
you can. It is all about reading the documentation on those
technologies.

I never used XSLT before I started using Word 2007. It took me a
couple of hours to figure out how it worked and I could start creating
my own stuff. I agree that coming from a computer science background
gave me an advantage, but still ... I had to start from zero.

No, you started from a computer science background. When I was an
undergraduate at Cornell (1968-72), there was one class in "computer
programming" available for non-majors, and it instantly filled up
every semester. When I was a grad student at Chicago (1972-76), I was
able to take Vic Yngve's class in COMIT II, a language he invented to
be like human language (and carried out a couple of publishable
projects as a result -- see ch. 5 [IIRC] of I. J. Gelb et al.'s
*Computer-Aided Analysis of Amorite* [1980]). That's not much use in
dealing with whatever programming may be today.

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

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[not without Sending this one!]
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