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      <td>Last modified 27 December 2004

        <h3>Background</h3>
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      <td><p align="right"> </p>
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<p>Many institutions require their documents to conform to a specific Style
Convention, which covers aspects of document format, including the styles of
bibliographic tables and citations. [<dfn>Citation: a short note recognizing
a source of information or of a quoted passage</dfn>.] There are a number of
Style Conventions: these include MLA, ASA, PSA, Harvard, Chicago. These
different styles differ in the way in which they present citations and
references for different types of source documents, such as books, articles,
journals, collections etc. If a document has been written with one Style
Convention it is a laborious task to convert all these references to another
style. The ideal would be a fully automated method of conversion. This
project is working towards that.</p>

<p>LaTeX, with BibTeX, is the standard word processor in mathematics and the
hard sciences. It can handle many types of bibliographic style conversions.
OpenOffice will have to emulate LaTeX/BibTeX's flexibility in bibliographic
styles (and in mathematic equations) if it is to gain acceptance in that
field.</p>

<p>OpenOffice's current bibliographic functions are limited. At present there
are two loosely coupled bibliographic components. One is the old StarOffice
5.2 Bibliographic database (dbase format) [<a href="biblioDbase.gif">screen
image</a>]. It has a simple reference insertion process. When an database
bibliographic entry is dragged onto a document, a dialog box opens which
allows the fields required for the entry to be selected [<a
href="//home/dnw/CVS/bibliographic/www/background-2.png">screen image</a>].
This process can be configured for only one citation format in one citation
style - eg book reference for MLA - and it does not support character
formatting of fields, such as italic or underlining. The bibliographic
database cannot import or export data in acceptable formats for other
bibliographic applications.</p>

<p>The other component is new in OpenOffice. It stores bibliographic data
within the document. The data is entered through 'Insert &gt;Indexes and
Tables&gt; Bibliographic Entry' function, and bibliographic tables can be
generated from it [<a
href="///home/dnw/CVS/bibliographic/www/background-3.png">screen image</a>].
The new facility can also access the old bibliographic database. It allows
Bibliographic citations to be selected either from the bibliographic database
or from the 'document content' and inserted into the document. Selecting the
'From document content' option and pressing the New button adds bibliographic
references as hidden fields. A Bibliographic Table can be inserted that
utilised the citations from the database and / or the 'document content' .
The format of the Bibliographic Table can be finely controlled (it has
character formatting) and this is a very good piece of design and
implementation [screen image]. However, the citation and table field
definitions can be set up to support only one Style Convention. To reset the
table definitions for a different style is a laborious exercise.</p>

<p>Another limitation is that only the in-text author-date [wilson2002] and
the endnote forms of citation are supported: the footnote style is not
supported. Another important limitation is that there is no capacity for
in-document bibliographic data to be easily imported or exported. Nor can
data be transferred between the internal document storage and the old
database<strong><a href="index.html">.</a></strong></p>

<p>For more details see <a href="deficiencies.html">A detailed list of
OpenOffice bibliographic deficiencies.</a></p>
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