Comment 4 for bug 632709

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m4cph1sto (dlreid) wrote :

I don't think the average user should have to deal with the xml file on a regular basis. Most users won't have the ability/patience to do that at all. I'll give you a couple usage scenarios I've encountered.

Different reference managers are good at different things. I use Referencer as my main reference manager. I like its simple interface and tagging system. But Mendeley is much better at extracting bibliography data from PDF files. So when adding a large number of PDFs, it would save me a lot of time to open my Referencer-generated .bib file in Mendeley, add the PDFs and have Mendeley automatically generate the bib data, then open the new, updated .bib in Referencer and add my tags. Right now I can't do that because Referencer does not save a "file" field in the .bib.

Here's another scenario. Some journals require references to use the full journal names, and some require abbreviated journal names. Referencer does not have the ability to abbreviate journal names. KBibTex, however, is well-suited for this task (but not for the things Referencer is good at). So when I'm near the final stages of writing a paper, I open my .bib in KBibTex, have it automatically abbreviate all the journal names, and save the new .bib. From this point onward, if I do any work using Referencer, it overwrites the .bib with the full journal names again. But if I keep working in KBibTex, it does not have links to open the local files. It's annoying.

Are there other solutions to the above usage scenarios? Maybe. But it would be really simple to have Referencer save some kind of "file" field that can be read by other Bibtex management software. Preferably, it should have the ability to write the "file" field in various formats that are compatible with other popular software. In my opinion, compatibility and inter-portability with other software is always a positive feature.