On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Nathan Paxton <napax...@fas.harvard.edu> wrote: > > > > This feature is support for bibtex's macros. You're basically supposed to be > familiar with bibtex if you use this feature, otherwise you're not supposed > to be interested in it. > > Christiaan > > Sorry. I hadn't realized that Macros were one of the advanced things I > should avoid interest in. I shall try to be less curious from here on.
Please don't. Maybe some historical context would help explain (but not excuse) the state of the documentation. For a long time, BibDesk didn't support bibtex macros. It would wrap everything you typed in the text box with a pair of braces. My opinion at the time was that macros were an old solution to having to type things over and over, one which I felt was better solved by autocompletion in the text fields (which BD did have). I still think this, because the UI is better, it's easier to copy bibtex entries around since they don't refer to macros anymore, and no one cares about duplicated storage of a few bytes here and there*. However, what I didn't know at the beginning was that macros are also used as a bit of an internationalization feature - by not defining the month macros, you can have an entry that refers to jun and let bibtex decide later if it wants to expand that to "June" or "June in some other language". So after being explained that many times by experienced LaTeX users (likely coming to BibDesk from emacs or the like), we added macros as they are now. I'd echo the earlier advice from James - if you are just trying to cut down on typing, use autocomplete and then you don't have to refer to the macros list to remember what you used as an abbreviation. * - Dan Abell points out another great use for macros if you happen to have a publisher who is demanding of their citation formats. Some of us have the opposite problem - our fields' publications do not demand enough consistency in formatting... But that's a gripe for another day. -mike > > Best, > -Nathan > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _______________________________________________ > Bibdesk-users mailing list > Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users > > -- Michael McCracken UCSD CSE PhD Candidate research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/ misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
