Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
On 20 Feb 2008, at 10:55 AM, Rolf Schmolling wrote: Am 19.02.2008 um 23:43 schrieb Adam R. Maxwell: In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Alexander H. Montgomery [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2008-02-19, at 2:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would it reduce the confusion to just save as UTF-8 by default? As long as TeX conversion is enabled, that should (usually) be fine for TeX users who work with ASCII exclusively. I save my files as UTF-8 just to avoid this problem, since the odd characters are almost exclusively in abstracts which never get printed in TeX anyway. -- adam If UTF-8 transparently deals with gremlins and plain text but Western ASCII does not, it would seem to make sense to have UTF-8 the default format as you suggest. The other related issue is that after I do convert my file to UTF-8, I get an annoying little message whenever I start BibDesk that says, The document will be opened with encoding Western (ASCII), but it was previously saved with encoding Unicode (UTF-8). You should cancel opening and then reopen with the correct encoding. If you go to Preferences-Files, you can change the Open and export BibTeX files using encoding to Unicode. That should stop the messages. Correct, or use the Open... menu item and specify UTF-8 as the encoding. … -- adam Hello, this was a very welcome hint. I've been pondering for a while what to do about UTF8 or not and comments and abstracts. That Bibdesk is handling this in the background was something I didn't know and I'm very happy to learn about! Now I face a problem connected to this. When citing references which have a quote in their title (I'm a historian) I've been putting in code-snippets like \glqq some title- text\grqq \ or \glqq some title-text\glqq into entries and via the babel{german}-package and jurabib they turned right into what I wanted them to look, in preview and in my documents. Does anybody know of a smarter way to do this? I am asking because when exporting a list of entries to html for an online bibliography those \glqq some title-text\grqq \ are obviously unwanted. Unfortunately quite a many references from my database have such modifications. Any hints, ideas? Greetings, Rolf -- Rolf Schmolling M.A. Historian, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rolf_schmolling.macbay.de/ You could turn on TeX conversion in the Files prefs, add custom 2-way conversions for {\glqq} and {\grqq}, and use those forms (including the braces). BibDesk will display the quotes, but save the TeX forms in bibtex. Christiaan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
Am 20.02.2008 um 11:09 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: Hello! in addition while testdriving I get the following: Title: {{\glqq}test'' } I did put in “ (smart curly quote up) greetings, Rolf -- Rolf Schmolling M.A. Historian, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rolf_schmolling.macbay.de/ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
On 20 Feb 2008, at 1:18 PM, Rolf Schmolling wrote: Am 20.02.2008 um 11:09 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: …You could turn on TeX conversion in the Files prefs, add custom 2- way conversions for {\glqq} and {\grqq}, and use those forms (including the braces). BibDesk will display the quotes, but save the TeX forms in bibtex. Christiaan Hello Christiaan, thanks for the tip, still I can put in a double low-9 quotation mark (UTF8: E2 80 9E) alright but when I try to put in a double high- reversed-9 quotation mark (UTF8: E2 80 9F) it gives me an error …you entered already has a TeX equivalent, possibly defined internally by BibDesk . Yes, these upper (double) quotes have a 1-way conversion to normal (double) quotes, as tex cannot handle them. That prevents you from adding custom ones. This is done because duplicates lead to inconsistent conversions. What I am basically aim for would be smart quotes German style („ “ where the first one is below and the closing quotation mark is up, both are curled properly). In connection to your tip, how to go on from here? If I write to the title (or whatever field) of a reference with my German keyboard would I get smart quotes to start with which then would be converted to a TeX-equivalent? I found out via the little keyboard-viewer that I can get the right quotes manually via alt+^ and alt+2 but this means I have to re-think what little touch-typing I've learned in recent months… duh. Greetings, Rolf Yes, that's how it would work. You can also just type the TeX equivalent (including the braces), and the next time you load BibDesk will convert it to special characters. Christiaan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
On 20 Feb 2008, at 1:20 PM, Rolf Schmolling wrote: Am 20.02.2008 um 11:09 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: Hello! in addition while testdriving I get the following: Title: {{\glqq}test'' } I did put in “ (smart curly quote up) greetings, Rolf You mean in the bibtex file? This is precisely what it does, if you defined a {\glqq} conversion. The other (”) is defined internally as a 1-way conversion to '', as I explained in my other mail. Christiaan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
On 20 Feb 2008, at 2:28 PM, Rolf Schmolling wrote: Hi Christiaan, Am 20.02.2008 um 13:50 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: On 20 Feb 2008, at 1:20 PM, Rolf Schmolling wrote: Am 20.02.2008 um 11:09 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: Hello! in addition while testdriving I get the following: Title: {{\glqq}test'' } I did put in “ (smart curly quote up) greetings, Rolf You mean in the bibtex file? This is precisely what it does, if you defined a {\glqq} conversion. The other (”) is defined internally as a 1-way conversion to '', as I explained in my other mail. Christiaan I just tried with a test-document of mine. It looks alright. I am still trying how that magic works. Grmmpf will read up in my LaTeX- companion. Greetings, Rolf For the next nightly I've allowed overwriting build-in 1-way conversions, such as curly (double) quotes. This allows you to define a (2-way) {\grqq} conversion. Christiaan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
Hi Christiaan, Am 20.02.2008 um 13:50 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: On 20 Feb 2008, at 1:20 PM, Rolf Schmolling wrote: Am 20.02.2008 um 11:09 schrieb Christiaan Hofman: Hello! in addition while testdriving I get the following: Title: {{\glqq}test'' } I did put in “ (smart curly quote up) greetings, Rolf You mean in the bibtex file? This is precisely what it does, if you defined a {\glqq} conversion. The other (”) is defined internally as a 1-way conversion to '', as I explained in my other mail. Christiaan I just tried with a test-document of mine. It looks alright. I am still trying how that magic works. Grmmpf will read up in my LaTeX- companion. Greetings, Rolf -- Rolf Schmolling M.A. Historian, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://rolf_schmolling.macbay.de/ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text, typographically correct (down and up) via babel/german and html-export
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rolf Schmolling [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: this was a very welcome hint. I've been pondering for a while what to do about UTF8 or not and comments and abstracts. That Bibdesk is handling this in the background was something I didn't know and I'm very happy to learn about! Now I face a problem connected to this. When citing references which have a quote in their title (I'm a historian) I've been putting in code-snippets like \glqq some title- text\grqq \ or \glqq some title-text\glqq into entries and via the babel{german}-package and jurabib they turned right into what I wanted them to look, in preview and in my documents. Does anybody know of a smarter way to do this? I am asking because when exporting a list of entries to html for an online bibliography those \glqq some title-text\grqq \ are obviously unwanted. Unfortunately quite a many references from my database have such modifications. Have you considered using xetex/xelatex? That would allow you to save the proper quotes directly as Unicode characters. If you depend on babel, an alternative might be to use some other encoding that supports those characters (8859-1?) with the appropriate inputenc command. -- adam - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
Thanks to everyone for their responses. I guess the bigger question is where is BibDesk going? Is the intent to make it a research tool for IT developers and programmers, or is it intended to become an application widely used by all scholars/researchers instead of that other commercial product? The issue I raised is really about accessibility for general users. When I first started using BD, I wiped out my first bibliography because a Western ASCII file suddenly having to handle A SINGLE UTF-8 character. (As I said, these are popping up in about one reference out of five that I get from EBSCO.) If the intent is to target highly technical IT users, this isn't a problem. If the intent is to make the product accessible to scholars/researchers in many areas, I think these issues need to be addressed and made transparent and highly compatible -- at least in the default settings. The average professor or grad student neither knows nor cares if his or her references are stored with UTF-8 or ASCII characters. They want to open a document and save their work without worrying about file formats or compatibility. These are just a few thoughts from an IT person who spends every day communicating with average users. Hope my thoughts are useful -- please take them in the spirit intended. Thanks again to everyone who contributes to BibDesk. -c In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Alexander H. Montgomery [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2008-02-19, at 2:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would it reduce the confusion to just save as UTF-8 by default? As long as TeX conversion is enabled, that should (usually) be fine for TeX users who work with ASCII exclusively. I save my files as UTF-8 just to avoid this problem, since the odd characters are almost exclusively in abstracts which never get printed in TeX anyway. -- adam If UTF-8 transparently deals with gremlins and plain text but Western ASCII does not, it would seem to make sense to have UTF-8 the default format as you suggest. The other related issue is that after I do convert my file to UTF-8, I get an annoying little message whenever I start BibDesk that says, The document will be opened with encoding Western (ASCII), but it was previously saved with encoding Unicode (UTF-8). You should cancel opening and then reopen with the correct encoding. If you go to Preferences-Files, you can change the Open and export BibTeX files using encoding to Unicode. That should stop the messages. Correct, or use the Open... menu item and specify UTF-8 as the encoding. I can see specifying a file format when I save (as), but why do I need to specify one when I open the document? BibDesk is telling you that it might misinterpret characters in your file, since you're interpreting it as ASCII when it was last saved as UTF-8. Because BibTeX files that are generated by other applications or by hand or from the web don't have the encoding string saved at the top of the file that BibDesk puts in when you save a file. Hence, it has a default for those files that it can't tell what encoding scheme it was saved in. Which then makes BibDesk upset when you open a file that it *knows* is something else (e.g., UTF-8), but you've told it to open it as, say, Western ASCII. The encoding string in the file is actually ignored; it's strictly for human consumption. It's also ridiculously fragile, so can be misleading. The encoding BibDesk uses for the alert is stored in the extended attributes of the file. Incidentally, this also allows TextEdit on Leopard to determine the encoding, so you can safely use it to edit your file regardless of the encoding. Other applications using Cocoa to read text files can take advantage of this as well. -- adam - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
Am 20.02.2008 um 18:22 schrieb [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Thanks to everyone for their responses. I guess the bigger question is where is BibDesk going? Is the intent to make it a research tool for IT developers and programmers, or is it intended to become an application widely used by all scholars/ researchers instead of that other commercial product? The issue I raised is really about accessibility for general users. When I first started using BD, I wiped out my first bibliography because a Western ASCII file suddenly having to handle A SINGLE UTF-8 character. (As I said, these are popping up in about one reference out of five that I get from EBSCO.) If the intent is to target highly technical IT users, this isn't a problem. If the intent is to make the product accessible to scholars/researchers in many areas, I think these issues need to be addressed and made transparent and highly compatible -- at least in the default settings. The average professor or grad student neither knows nor cares if his or her references are stored with UTF-8 or ASCII characters. They want to open a document and save their work without worrying about file formats or compatibility. These are just a few thoughts from an IT person who spends every day communicating with average users. Hope my thoughts are useful -- please take them in the spirit intended. Thanks again to everyone who contributes to BibDesk. -c I see your point here but feel I have to disagree. Unfortunately, the encoding issue is never too far away once you start handling files from different backgrounds. BibDesk comes from LaTeX and there I think you can not avoid dealing with encoding issues. The average professor or grad student will have to care about encoding once he starts to share his files. This being said, I can not see how BibDesk could find a satisfying way other than providing meaningful preferences and various saving-options - both of which the program does as far as I am concerned. I had my bad experiences, too, in the beginning (wiping out a paper for a grad class). Now I stick to UTF-8 but still can't avoid dealing with the issue as soon as I get files from colleagues. So I would not call it a decision between IT-savy elites and normal scholars. Cheers, A. *snip = please avoid sending me word attachements; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html for details and background - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
We're certainly not going to automatically delete data, if that's what you're proposing. That's simply not an option. Christiaan On 19 Feb 2008, at 4:55 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I raised this issue several months ago, but don't think I made myself clear. A problem I've run into is that if I import a reference with non-plain-text (Unicode?) character (an en-dash, an em-dash, an open or closed quote) in the abstract, it will require a save as in a different file format with a different file name. This occurs when using the default Western ASCII file format. I frequently recommend BibDesk to students and fellow scholars. However, I am loath to do so with anyone but the most technical -- this is a serious frustration for the average user, who will be confused by the issue. I typically cut the abstract, paste it into BBEdit and run the Zap Gremlins command to replace/remove the offending characters. I've tried to manually remove these characters from the abstract in BibDesk, but I find that sometimes they can be invisible. It would be great to have a strip out gremlins option to automatically convert these. I typically use EBSCO to retrive citations, and I'd guess this problem arises in about 20 percent of the time. Thanks again to all who work on development and support for BibDesk -- it really is an amazing tool. -c - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I raised this issue several months ago, but don't think I made myself clear. A problem I've run into is that if I import a reference with non-plain-text (Unicode?) character (an en-dash, an em-dash, an open or closed quote) in the abstract, it will require a save as in a different file format with a different file name. This occurs when using the default Western ASCII file format. I frequently recommend BibDesk to students and fellow scholars. However, I am loath to do so with anyone but the most technical -- this is a serious frustration for the average user, who will be confused by the issue. Would it reduce the confusion to just save as UTF-8 by default? As long as TeX conversion is enabled, that should (usually) be fine for TeX users who work with ASCII exclusively. I save my files as UTF-8 just to avoid this problem, since the odd characters are almost exclusively in abstracts which never get printed in TeX anyway. -- adam - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
Christiaan, If you deleted all the data, think how much quicker everything would run! :-) Actually, I was thinking something more along the lines of a setting in the preferences that says, Replace non-printing characters with ~ or something similar to what BBEdit does to clean-up troublesome characters. See my reply to Adam in a follow-up e-mail. Thanks again for your reply, Christiaan! -Cloy We're certainly not going to automatically delete data, if that's what you're proposing. That's simply not an option. Christiaan On 19 Feb 2008, at 4:55 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I raised this issue several months ago, but don't think I made myself clear. A problem I've run into is that if I import a reference with non-plain-text (Unicode?) character (an en-dash, an em-dash, an open or closed quote) in the abstract, it will require a save as in a different file format with a different file name. This occurs when using the default Western ASCII file format. I frequently recommend BibDesk to students and fellow scholars. However, I am loath to do so with anyone but the most technical -- this is a serious frustration for the average user, who will be confused by the issue. I typically cut the abstract, paste it into BBEdit and run the Zap Gremlins command to replace/remove the offending characters. I've tried to manually remove these characters from the abstract in BibDesk, but I find that sometimes they can be invisible. It would be great to have a strip out gremlins option to automatically convert these. I typically use EBSCO to retrive citations, and I'd guess this problem arises in about 20 percent of the time. Thanks again to all who work on development and support for BibDesk -- it really is an amazing tool. -c - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
On 2008-02-19, at 2:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would it reduce the confusion to just save as UTF-8 by default? As long as TeX conversion is enabled, that should (usually) be fine for TeX users who work with ASCII exclusively. I save my files as UTF-8 just to avoid this problem, since the odd characters are almost exclusively in abstracts which never get printed in TeX anyway. -- adam If UTF-8 transparently deals with gremlins and plain text but Western ASCII does not, it would seem to make sense to have UTF-8 the default format as you suggest. The other related issue is that after I do convert my file to UTF-8, I get an annoying little message whenever I start BibDesk that says, The document will be opened with encoding Western (ASCII), but it was previously saved with encoding Unicode (UTF-8). You should cancel opening and then reopen with the correct encoding. If you go to Preferences-Files, you can change the Open and export BibTeX files using encoding to Unicode. That should stop the messages. I can see specifying a file format when I save (as), but why do I need to specify one when I open the document? Because BibTeX files that are generated by other applications or by hand or from the web don't have the encoding string saved at the top of the file that BibDesk puts in when you save a file. Hence, it has a default for those files that it can't tell what encoding scheme it was saved in. Which then makes BibDesk upset when you open a file that it *knows* is something else (e.g., UTF-8), but you've told it to open it as, say, Western ASCII. -AHM I see that there's a conversion option when pasting and exporting text... What I'm suggesting would simply add that functionality to importing. Thanks! -c - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
Would it reduce the confusion to just save as UTF-8 by default? As long as TeX conversion is enabled, that should (usually) be fine for TeX users who work with ASCII exclusively. I save my files as UTF-8 just to avoid this problem, since the odd characters are almost exclusively in abstracts which never get printed in TeX anyway. -- adam If UTF-8 transparently deals with gremlins and plain text but Western ASCII does not, it would seem to make sense to have UTF-8 the default format as you suggest. The other related issue is that after I do convert my file to UTF-8, I get an annoying little message whenever I start BibDesk that says, The document will be opened with encoding Western (ASCII), but it was previously saved with encoding Unicode (UTF-8). You should cancel opening and then reopen with the correct encoding. I can see specifying a file format when I save (as), but why do I need to specify one when I open the document? I see that there's a conversion option when pasting and exporting text... What I'm suggesting would simply add that functionality to importing. Thanks! -c - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
Re: [Bibdesk-users] Gremlins in the text
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Alexander H. Montgomery [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2008-02-19, at 2:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would it reduce the confusion to just save as UTF-8 by default? As long as TeX conversion is enabled, that should (usually) be fine for TeX users who work with ASCII exclusively. I save my files as UTF-8 just to avoid this problem, since the odd characters are almost exclusively in abstracts which never get printed in TeX anyway. -- adam If UTF-8 transparently deals with gremlins and plain text but Western ASCII does not, it would seem to make sense to have UTF-8 the default format as you suggest. The other related issue is that after I do convert my file to UTF-8, I get an annoying little message whenever I start BibDesk that says, The document will be opened with encoding Western (ASCII), but it was previously saved with encoding Unicode (UTF-8). You should cancel opening and then reopen with the correct encoding. If you go to Preferences-Files, you can change the Open and export BibTeX files using encoding to Unicode. That should stop the messages. Correct, or use the Open... menu item and specify UTF-8 as the encoding. I can see specifying a file format when I save (as), but why do I need to specify one when I open the document? BibDesk is telling you that it might misinterpret characters in your file, since you're interpreting it as ASCII when it was last saved as UTF-8. Because BibTeX files that are generated by other applications or by hand or from the web don't have the encoding string saved at the top of the file that BibDesk puts in when you save a file. Hence, it has a default for those files that it can't tell what encoding scheme it was saved in. Which then makes BibDesk upset when you open a file that it *knows* is something else (e.g., UTF-8), but you've told it to open it as, say, Western ASCII. The encoding string in the file is actually ignored; it's strictly for human consumption. It's also ridiculously fragile, so can be misleading. The encoding BibDesk uses for the alert is stored in the extended attributes of the file. Incidentally, this also allows TextEdit on Leopard to determine the encoding, so you can safely use it to edit your file regardless of the encoding. Other applications using Cocoa to read text files can take advantage of this as well. -- adam - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users