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| <table width="80%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2"> |
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| <td>Last modified 27 December 2004 |
| |
| <h3>Background</h3> |
| </td> |
| <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 >Indexes and |
| Tables> 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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