On Sep 12, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote: > > On Wednesday, September 12, 2007, at 09:48AM, "Rainer Sigwald" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On 9/12/07, Adam R. Maxwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>> Okay, using a document-relative path certainly makes sense in >>> that situation. The question then becomes: should we keep this >>> behavior, or break it now? (By break, I mean use home-relative >>> instead of document-relative paths). Opinions from the users? >>> What's easier for people to deal with? I think Mike may be >>> responsible for the original implementation, so maybe he has >>> comments. >> >> I strongly prefer the relative-to-bibfile implementation. I keep >> both >> my .bib file and my papers folder in a Subversion repository, which I >> may check out to a different location periodically. >> >> I also have concerns about the new system with regard to >> cross-platform compatibility and human readability. The current >> system makes it quite easy to open the .bib file in (for example) >> vim/emacs/Notepad and extrapolate from "local-url = {}" to find the >> referenced file by hand. That doesn't seem possible with the >> proposed >> ASCII-armored Mac OS X alias. Is that correct, or am I >> misunderstanding? > > This is correct. It should also be possible to keep the old system > around, although I'm not sure how we'll manage autofile in that > case. The only reason I can see for doing this is cross-platform > compatibility; if you find using vi or (shudder) emacs easier than > BibDesk on Mac OS, we're doing something wrong :). > > Incidentally, scripting would give you access to paths in the new > system, so conceivably you could use a script hook to copy them to > Local-Url when saving. No idea how practical that is.
FWIW, I favor keeping the document-relative paths as a backup for a couple of reasons: 1)You can send an archive of a .bib file and the PDFs to someone else; all of the local-url links still work if stored relatively. 2)Cross-platform compatibility: JabRef stores a "pdf" or "ps" field that is relative to a "main PDF directory," so that if local-url is copied to a "pdf" field (and the directory is correctly specified), the links still work. 3)While you can't sling around your .bib file and have the links still work (the advantage of home-directory-relative paths), the new File Aliases method should fix that problem. Slightly off-topic, 1) reminds me of a nice new feature of Endnote X (yes, they actually added a new feature), which is to send a library and its PDFs to a compressed archive which a user on the other end can decompress and have all of the PDFs nicely linked. A similar thing could be done with BibDesk fairly easily, I should link... -AHM ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users