[OS X TeX] Crossrefs and BibDesk

[Matthias Damm]

Am 05.07.2005 um 04:41 schrieb Jon Hanson:

> For a moment, I thought that I had missed something really obvious,  
> but I already had that preference option checked.  So I am back to  
> what I wrote earlier: BibDesk leaves Booktitle blank on the child  
> record when the Booktitle field does not exist on the parent.
> The check box affects the creation of new parent records, and it is  
> older records that are causing the trouble.  I guess what I need to  
> do is fix all my older records.

Exactly. And I thought the "Always Overwrite" option did exactly that.
Have you tried saving and re-opening the file? I am not sure when the  
Booktitle information is set.

You should describe this in your bug report if it does not work for  
you -- if it really does not work, it is a bug.

> I understand that this auto-creation of the Booktitle field  
> procedure is due to a problem with BibTex itself.  Have people  
> always entered a "Booktitle" field for any edited volumes?

Yes.
Unfortunately an "incollection" item needs two titles, "Title" for  
the article and "Booktitle" for the volume.
BibTeX's crossref mechanism works in a rather simple way: It takes  
all information that is not present in the child item from the parent  
item. An "incollection" already has a "Title" field, so the parent's  
"Title" is ignored. But you can work around this by copying the  
parent's "Title" to "Booktitle", so the child will inherit this  
information correctly.

Are you subscribed the the BibDesk developer list? There was a lot of  
discussion about this before the crossref feature was implemented  
some weeks ago.

> It still seems, though, that the child record should not inherit  
> anything in the Title field for the book/incollection combination.

Correct. And it won't inherit the Title, if it already has an own Title.

If your problem remains, we could move the discussion to the  
Developer list.

Best,
Matthias

-- 
Matthias Damm
mad at macpla.net
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