[OS X TeX]

[Simon Spiegel]

> BibDesk certainly looks nice, being a proper Cocoa app, but it needs 
> work before it can be adopted. Its treatment of macros is fatally 
> flawed: it expects macros to be defined locally to the .bib file and it 
> actually expands them, when many BibTeX users define all their 
> abbreviations in a separate .bib file and may have separate versions 
> for abbreviated and non-abbreviated versions. It doesn't even cope with 
> macros defined in .bst files, like the names of months and major 
> journals.

> I have just started using JabRef, http://jabref.sourceforge.net/. It is 
> a generic Java application, so it looks rather clunky, but it 
> understands BibTeX. It read all my old .bib files without complaining 
> and without losing information.

Different people have different needs. I don't user macros and found Jabrefs UI
very clunky. I also didn't like the fact that Jabref only provides entry fields
for standard bibtex fields. If you have costum fields you have to go to the
bibtex source (which you can access inside Jabref). It doesn't offer
autocompletion of fields nor can it interact with other OSX apps.

simon
--
Simon Spiegel
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8038 Zürich

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