Hello, I just saw your interesting project for OpenOffice. I congratulate you for the initiative. I think it is a key application to allow scholars to use OO.
I only have one disagreement regarding the design of the system. I believe your system would be much more powerful, simpler, and useful if it sticks to the Bibtex file format rather than implementing a new one. The benefits of this are many: - The work is already done. This is a working format, thoroughly tested, with tens or hundreds of thousand users. In fact it is the de facto standard for serious academic writers. - Processing Bibtex format it is faster than XML. - It will also be faster to program. No need to call any library or develop a new one. You can even copy & paste code from other open source projects that manipulate Bibtex. And these are the two most important reasons: - You would simplify the life of people that start writing a paper in OpenOffice and when the complexity is high move to Latex. No need to translate the bibliography. In fact, most people would probably have just one file with all their citations for all their papers. It is a great simplification. There are users that need to move back and forth between Latex and a word processor. - There are many systems and websites developed that as part of their work translate bibliographies to Bibtex. Many of the online reference services (like citeseer) or even libraries, already output Bibtex. For all these third parties to move to the new format it would take forever. Finally, more philosophical arguments: - It is against the spirit of open source to fork. Especially when the previous solution is good. - This is the opportunity to strengthen the position of Bibtex. You would contribute to living in a simpler world. No need to have several backends. Just one, plain text and terse, very in the spirit of Unix. - Even if the Bibliographic project develops good import and export filters (which will mean extra work). The chore of importing, exporting, and synchronizing, will be costly for the end users. Sorry for the long posting. But I think this is the right moment to reconsider the formats decision. I congratulate you again for the project and wish you luck whatever you decide. Felipe --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
