[OS X TeX] Sente - New bibliographic app

[Denis Chabot]

Hi,

Le Vendredi, 10 sept 2004, à 02:00 Europe/Paris, TeX on Mac OS X 
Mailing List a écrit :

> Simon Spiegel wrote:
>
>> I just stumbled across this yesterday and it looks quite interesting.
>> Sente ( http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/index.cgi?page=introduction
>> ) is an app for retrieiving all kind of online bibliographic data. It
>> can access Pubmed, LoC, z39.50 servers and probably. You can create
>> quite elaborate filters and it automatically updates your searches. It
>> exports to BibTeX and EndNote. Unfortunately it's not free.
>
> Its a nice app. I'm thinking of buying it after some encouraging 
> exchanges with the developer. Exporting BibTeX to BibDesk is a bit 
> clunky (goes via an intermediate text file), but it works. Adding (in 
> the case of Sente) and improving (in the case of BibDesk) AppleScript 
> support could vastly improve the utility of both apps.
>
> BTW is anyone using Bookends and ReferenceMiner ? If so, any gotchas 
> wrt BibTeX ?
>
> mark.
>
About 8 months ago I switched from EndNote to Bookends because EndNote 
was becoming to Windows centric in my view. I cannot comment much on 
Bookends usefulness to the TeX world because I am very much a beginner 
to TeX. But I think the idea is to use Bookends with your LaTeX 
documents just as you would use it (or EndNote) with a Word or rtf 
document: you use its method of inserting citations, and it will 
produce a copy of your document with the inline citations inserted and 
a bibliography at the end. It can also accept TeX style citations 
(\cite or whatever you decide, but only one is possible in a given 
document) instead of its own, but in the present version you would lose 
the ability to have the citations formatted inside or outside 
parenthesis if you don't stick to its own citation mechanism, at the 
cost of portability. The author is very responsive though, and in a 
next revision will allow the use of 2 citations strings of your choice, 
for instance \citep and \citet, to fulfill that need. But my 
understanding is that it will not produce a file containing your 
citations that can be further manipulated with BibTex etc. This could 
be good for a beginner as it is much easier to define a new 
bibliography formatting style in Bookends than in programming. You can 
also take advantage of Bookends list of Journals and their 
abbreviations to switch from full journal titles to abbreviations 
according to you needs. I think you use macros to do this in TeX, but I 
have not reached this level of TeX-maturity yet.

I did not have time to experiment much and these conclusions could be 
due to my ignorance.  Again the author is very open to suggestions.


Denis Chabot

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