On Jun 15, 2006, at 11:34 AM, Bruce Pourciau wrote:

Thanks, André. But I'd prefer not to use a script. I'm looking for the simplest way to get my references from the current plain form into the

Smith, B. (1980) The article name. The journal name, volume, page range.
(Smith, 1980, p.14)

styles, using LyX alone, or with Bibdesk, or with whatever.

The script provided there is intended to make it possible to select items in your BibDesk database and have bibliographical citations for these shoved into your LyX document. That's useful, but I take in not what you have in mind.

Rather, I take it you want to somehow convert the contents of the LyX Bibliography environment to BibDesk, without retyping. I don't think that's possible: BibDesk is a GUI frontend to BibTeX, which works by identifying logical parts of a bibliographical citation so that natbib/jurabib can automatically format or reformat these citations for you in many different styles. For this to work, you need to enter "Smith, B" into the author field, "1980" into the year field, "The article name" into the title field, etc. (Moreover, you have to specify that this is an article being cited rather than a book or anything else.) That requires a degree of intelligence you're not likely to find in a converter.

On the bright side, once you've entered something into BibDesk, you'll never have to retype it again. From within LyX, you simply select the file containing the bibliographical database(s) you've constructed with BibDesk. (The database is not tied to a single LyX document, but can be reused as many times as you wish.) Then any time you want to cite something, it's as simple as Insert > Citation; LyX pulls up the list of all citations found in those databases. (Or, you can select particular citations in BibDesk, and run the above mentioned script to have them appear magically in LyX.)

Bennett

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