Difference between revisions of "Bibliographic/Writer enhancements for OOBib"

Revision as of 02:53, 30 March 2006

Support for Document Style selection

The WP GUI interface needs an enhancement to support Document Style selection, saving and loading. The document file format should have a Current Document Style field added which would contain the Current Style Name.

The Document Style selection GUI would provide a list of the installed Document Style Packages (see next section). Other options would be to Import and Export Document Style Packages.

The current facilities support only one default document style. Document style selection should apply to the whole document. Some styles such as MLA’s Research Paper defines line spacing, margins and headings etc and these settings should be supported as well. Also there are options within styles. For example, an other bibliographic software package provides the following options for The MLA Handbook version 4 -

• Document Type-
  • Article (Non-anonymous Review)
  • Article (Masked/Anonymous Review)
  • Chapter in Manuscript At [ ] (number)
  • Chapter in Dissertation/Thesis At [ ] (number)
  • Student research Paper

• Heading Numbering System-
  • 1, 1.1, 1.3, etc.
  • Level 1 always A; Level 2 always B (in 1st edition)
  • Level 1 is [1] [2]; Level 2 is 1.1 (in 1st edition)

• Note types-
  • Footnote
  • Endnote

• Include elements-
  • Preliminary Text
  • Back Matter

The Document Style package contents.

The Document Style Package would contain the following information-

• The Style full name, and version number.
• The user selectable style options.
• Name of macro to set up document formating options (margins, headings etc.)
• Rules defining the automated treatment repeating footnote references with 'Ibid' or 'op cite' (etc.)
• The bibliographic table sorting library name (to select the sorting module).
• The datasource specification which contains an XPATH statement pointing to the file or database that contains the bibliographic records. (Citporc can 'include' this statement).
• The name of Citproc package of xslt code-sheets to produce -
  • In-text citations
  • Footnote initial citations
  • Footnote subsequent citations
  • Endnote initial citations
  • Endnote subsequent citations
  • Bibliographic table entries

New Field and Insert menu item 'Quotation'

Add a new Insert menu item 'Quotation'. This would paste the current clipboard item into the document and tag it with bibliographic source data using the same or similar dialog as Insert->Indexes and Tables->Bibliographic Entry->New. There should be a (user configurable) method of highlighting quotation text and objects, for example, with color underlining or highlighting. It would have an appropriate context menu to allow the editing of the bibliographic source data. Quotation objects would have an option to display the attached citation or not according to the current style. Quotations would also have the ability to assign a style to that text. There would also be a new Indexes/Table type – 'Quotations'. Which would be very similar to the Bibliographic Table but would also have the object type as field ie. Text, graphic, chart, drawing etc.

The attributes of the Quotations in a document should also be available in the Cross-reference facility.

Support for the footnote citation style

Support needs to added for the footnote citation style (commonly used in the Humanities, and particularly in History) such as defined in the Chicago Manual of Style. Eg.

34. Thomas M. Charles-Edwards,"Honour and status in Some Irish and Welsh Prose Tales.", Eriu, xxxvi, 1978. 35. Charles-Edwards, loc. cit., page 325. 36. ibid.

NOTE: Some styles prefer ibid, (for ibidem, "in the same place") in stead of op. cit and loc. cit.

Different treatment for first and subsequent uses of the citation. There needs to be provision for user selection for, and the defining of citations and references with different treatment for first and subsequent uses of the citation.

There is a tedious and fault prone aspects of the footnote / endnote citation method - the maintenance the Initial and Subsequent citations in the correct order as one edits the text. It is not difficult when editing to move a piece of text and have as result the Initial Citation reference coming after the Subsequent reference. An automated process would ensure these errors do not occur.

Ibid

There needs to be support for the automated treatment repeating footnote references such as the use of 'ibid' (or 'op cit' or 'loc. cit') depending on style.

Handling of other text in footnote citation support

In designing the footnote citation support consideration needs to be take of the handling of other (non-bibliographic citation) text in the footnote, when the user changes the document style form footnote to in-text citation. In general the user text would remain in the footnote when the citation was moved to in-text. But the Insert->Bibliographic dialog would need to allow the user to tag or insert text what was to be a suffix of a prefix to the citation whatever citation method was selected. When this was used then, if no other text was in the footnote, then all the text would be moved in-text with the new citation format and the footnote deleted.

Citation types to be supported

Chicago Manual of Style (and possible other style manuals) specify different formats for footnote and endnote citations and the bibliographic table (citation use Initials & Surname, Bibliography Table uses Surname & Initials). So we need to define formats for

• In-text citations
• Footnote initial citations
• Footnote subsequent citations
• Endnote initial citations
• Endnote subsequent citations

User selectable footnote and endnote location

There needs to be an option to place the document wide footnotes and endnotes an a user selectable location. Currently, for endnotes, there are only two options available at the end of the document or at the end of each section. For footnotes there are two options for Position=’End of Page’ or ‘End Of Document’. A new option needs to be provided to allow for a user selectable location for both. Perhaps this could be implemented with a new option in Format->Sections to include an check box with "[] Place Document Endnotes at the end of this section" and "[] Place Document Footnotes at the end of this section". Only one section in each document should have each setting.

The reason this needs to be made more flexible is that style manuals specify different locations. For example the formatting guidelines for APA and Chicago style submissions specify the following order for the sections in a document:

APA Style 
  title page 
  abstract 
  text 
  references 
  appendixes 
  author note 
  footnotes/endnotes 
  tables 
  figure captions 
  figures 

Chicago Style (back matter) 
  Appendix 
  Endnotes 
  Glossary 
  Bibliography 
  Index 
  Colophon 

See issue number 37679 for details.

Note: Whilst Bibliographic citations can be in-text, footnote or endnote types. The user should still be able to – when using footnote citations use endnotes as well and when using endnote citations use footnotes as well. To support this properly there should be provision for Footnote symbols. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. section 16.63 p 609, stipulates that when Endnotes and Footnotes are both used, the Endnotes are consecutively numbered (1,2,3 ...) and the footnotes referenced by symbols. The symbol series they suggest are - and as more symbols are needed they are doubled and trebled - .