[OS X TeX] Crossrefs in BibDesk?

[Matthias Damm]

Am 18.05.2005 um 19:54 schrieb Adam Maxwell:

>> This is nice, definitely, but still: Crossrefs are not just something
>> that makes managing your .bib file easier, but they are a BibTeX
>> feature. I would not like to lose the feature which automatically
>> puts referencing and referenced items to the bibliography (see my
>> answer to Cifton).
>>
>
> You're making things much more clear, and I appreciate your time.   
> However, I'm still not sure about the "min-crossrefs=" part.  What  
> does this do for your bibliography?

Assume that you have a proceedings volume and you cite two (or more)  
articles from it.

When you don't use crossref, you will end up with two entries in your  
bibliography, each of with containing the full bibliographic data for  
the proceedings volume. This is kind of ugly, especially if the  
volume has very extensive data.

When you use crossref, you will end up with two entries with the  
bibliographic data for each article followed by "In: <Shorttitle of  
the proceedings volume>", and a separate entry with the full data for  
the proceedings volume.

You can control this by calling bibtex with the min-crossrefs option,  
i.e. set the number of articles which have to exist before bibtex  
creates a separate entry for the proceedings volume.

I am a political scientist, and this kind ob bibliography is quite  
usual in publications from my subject.

(Was this clear? I hope so ... The LaTeX Companion also has a brief  
description of this feature in section 10.2.5)

> Part of the problem from my perspective is that a whole separate  
> front end could be written for BibTool, and we don't want to  
> support all of its features (this is a slippery slope).  Further,  
> it introduces potential for third-party bugs; for instance, how  
> does BibTool handle Unicode strings?  What sort of parsing engine  
> does it use?  Don't get me wrong: BibTool is incredibly useful, but  
> it's difficult to debug and use.  Re-implementing a small part of  
> its functionality in our Cocoa object model will be less painful in  
> the long run (see the new "select duplicates" feature which was <10  
> lines of code).

O.k., I see the point.
After all, I don't know much about programming (see above, I am a  
humanities guy ...), I see that it is a bit unfair to suggest things  
from a user perspective and expect you to solve all the problems  
which might be caused :-)

>> If the Title/Booktitle problem was solved as well, I personally was
>> totally happy ...
>>
>
> This is the most urgent issue, I think, but I've forgotten the   
> particulars of the discussion (this is why we like those bug  
> reports, even if the sf.net tracker is hideously ugly).

 From my perspective, this is quite "easy" as well:
The crossref feature is quite dumb and will ignore the proceedings  
volume's Title field if there is a Title field for the article (which  
usually is the case); but it will work correctly if the volume's  
title is given in the Booktitle field.
Everything that would have be done is to add a Booktitle field with  
the Title information to all entries which might be crossref'd (and  
only to those), that is book and proceedings.

Best,
Matthias

-- 
Matthias Damm
mad at macpla.net
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