[OS X TeX] How are bib-entries sorted in autocompletion?

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Oct 5, 2013, at 05:43 , Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 5, 2013, at 7:31 AM, Themis Matsoukas <tmatsoukas at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
>> In the small example below, autocompletion gives me 6 options but I cannot figure by what rule they are sorted. With more references it becomes more difficult to locate the one I want. Is there a way to sort entries alphabetically? 
>> 
> As far as I know the plugin used by TeXShop is supplied by the folks from BibDesk. It might be worthwhile asking at their web site, <http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net>.

Right, none of them would think of monitoring this list to answer questions :). To be pedantic, it's actually not a plugin anymore; TeXShop uses the code that we used to ship as an input manager.

To answer Themis' question, I had a look at the code. There's no attempt made at sorting, and results are returned in the order in which they appear in the BibTeX database. I see a couple of reasonable options:

1) sort by citekey, as that's the first element displayed

2) sort items as they appear in the main table

The second is more flexible, obviously, but users would probably think it was non-deterministic. Before anyone asks, no, this won't be a preference in BibDesk :).

> I've been meaning to ask them if they could build in some expandability for commands they will fill. Maybe now I'll do that! :-)

The bibdesk-users list is really low-traffic these days, so that's a good place for BibDesk-specific discussion.

regards,
Adam


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