User talk:Dnw

DRAFT Bibliographic Project's Developer Page

Project Overview

The Bibliographic Project (OOoBib) plans to enhance the bibliographic functions of the OpenOffice.org Writer (wordprocessing) application to achieve:

1. Enhance bibliographic formatting to support:

  a. complex features required of commonly used citation styles like APA and Chicago.
  b. automatically switching between potentially radically different citation styles (ie. footnote to in-text).

2 Enhance data model to support a broader range of reference types. 3. Add support for connection to remote database.

Our current objective is to design and build OOoBib version 0.1, which will contain the most basic functions for an usable bibligraphic facility with the above features.

1st Stage, Bibliographic Facility Redevelopment

Summary As our first step, we will implement the most simple changes to the OOo core code (the API basic code, and UNO mappings, but not yet the user interface code) necessary to implement basic support for:

1. Support saving and reading enhanced citation support in OpenDocument 2. Ability to insert and display citations in OpenOffice Writer using the new format. (Note this task does not include the GUI interface to insert the citation in the new format, only the UNO interface to provide the basic function. 3. Storage of document bibliographic data in the OOo document save package and the code changes necessary to read and save that bibliographic data.

When these basic functions are built into OOo and are made assessable via the UNO, we can then use rapid prototyping development methods to design and build prototype GUI interfaces and bibliographic formatting engines. We will be able to use any of the programming languages which have OpenOffice bindings: C++, Java, Python and, of course, OpenOffice Basic. We believe that we will find more developers who can work in these languages than by insisting on C++ code from the start. Also it is much easier to build prototypes using Java, Python and OpenOffice Basic than in C++.

NB. When we have designed, built and tested the prototypes and they have been accepted by the OOo community we intend to rebuild them in C++ and to have them made part of the core OpenOffice application. Skills required - good C++ programming and some XML skills with knowledge of, or willingness to learn, the OpenOffice UNO (see the Openoffice Developer's Guide)

2nd Stage Bibliographic Facility Redevelopment

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 1. Add Backwards and Forwards Compatability Logic to Writer

An important object of Bibliographic Enhancement project is to maintain document file backwards compatibility with older versions of OpenOffice. To achieve this when Bibliographic Entries are inserted into a Document they are stored with the same format as is currently the case. A new bibliographic entry tag will be will be added with the enhanced citation functions. Also a copy of the bibliographic data will be saved in the document save package. Older version of OpenOffice will read the old format of the bibliographic citations and ignore the bibliographic data file in the save package. The proposed enhanced OpenOffice will function as illustrated below When a major revision of the save package format is introduced the support of the older bibliographic representations can be dropped.

The backwards compatability diagram should be here but I can not insert it. See [1]

The API module(s) concerned are: interface XComponentLoader [2] "This is a simple interface to load components by an URL into a frame environment." which supports loadComponentFromURL and storeAsURL See the Development Guide explanation for - 6.1.5 Handling Documents[3]

2. Add Z39.50[4] and SRU/W[5] support for the Bibliographic modules. Build Z39.50 and SRU/W based internet searching facility using the YAZ[6] toolkit (C & C++). This would enable searching for and retrieving bibliographic data from internet sources and storing them in a document or bibliographic database.

There is also a demonstration client program - IRTCL (requires YAZ and Tcl/Tk libraries be installed) that can perform the reference searches. It does everything but save or export the results ! However it is good model of how to use the toolkit and could be used as the basis for or model of a prototype internet searching facility. Screen pic[7], screen pic2[8].

A demonstration internet searching facility that writes selected bibliographic records back to the OOo bibliographic database has been written in Python - PyOOBib[9]. Also instructions are available[10]. Various problems with OOo Python have lead to us concluding that YAZ would be a better foundation than the Python code. Also build Z39.50 and SRU/W server capability into OOo to enable users to share their bibliographic (and other) databases over the internet. One of the Indexdata[11] toolkits could probably used as a basis.

The modules that may need to be modified are:

• Bibliography [12]
• textfield/Bibliography [13]
• FieldMaster/Bibliography [14]
• BibliographyDataField [15]

NB: We are considering using SWU/W as the standard method for OOo retrieving bibliographic data from any source. So that even a local Bibliographic database would also be accessed through SWU/W methods. The user would just select a local or remote source and the same access mechanism would be used.

3. Design and Build a basic Graphical User Interface (GUI). To provide -

• Basic citation insertion
• Basic bibliographic data entry
• Citation and bibliographic table formating using Citeproc.
• Basic Bibliographic database access
• Basic bibliographic internet search and database storage.

How to get started

Access to the source code for this project is available for download via CVS. A child work space has been created for us called "metabib" which contains a copy of the xmloff[16] (OpenOffice.org XML File Format Definition) and sw (the word processor application component and the WYSIWYG HTML editor component) code. The down load size will be about 1GB(?). And you will need about 2GB of disk space to compile the metabib CWS (Child-Work-Space)[17]. ( Web access to CWS ). If you can not handle that size download then ask us about sending it to you on cdroms. Administration process - you first need to sign the JCA and then obtain the ssh key. After that we will show you how you can access the 'CWS'. It's basically a CVS branch. The most complicated thing is the setup of your tools, such that you can participate in the OOo development --- but, when you have got the ssh key we will show you. See OpenOffice.org For Developers[18] for general development information.

Sample Code

• Sample python code that reads and outputs some of the fields of the records in the bibliographic database. biblioacess.py[]
• Sample OpenOffice Basic program to write records to the bibliographic database bibwrite.html[19]
• Henrik Just's LaTeX and BibTeX export filter http://www.hj-gym.dk/~hj/writer2latex/[20]

Applications which interact with Openoffice- Bibus (WxPython) and B3 (Java).

• A Perl module OpenOffice::OODoc[21] provides a simple way to access document elements in the (closed i.e. not interactive with OOo) document save file. An example[22] which retrieves bibliographic details is provided.

Contacts

Question or comments can be put to the Bibliographic Project development list dev@bibliographic.openoffice.org or to the project co-leader David Wilson at dnw@openoffice.org.