BiblioRama

Newsletter for Biblioscape

October, 2002

A new book about using Biblioscape by Verne Wheelwright
Open source WordPerfect scripts developed by Hugh Gunz
Latest Biblioscape 5 patch is available for download
BiblioExpress 3 is under development
Biblioscape Palm edition

NEWS

A new book about using Biblioscape by Verne Wheelwright

"Research Information Management with Biblioscape" is written by Verne Wheelwright, and published by CG Information. It is an introductory book about using Biblioscape as a research tool. The author walks new users through the basic features offered in Biblioscape. The first few chapters tells users how to enter information into different modules in Biblioscape. The second section explains how to organize and find the information you have entered. The third section deals with the essential part of bibliographic software - generate citations and bibliography for a paper. The last two sections introduce users to the Library Module in Biblioscape and the way to publish your database on the Web. Once finished reading the book, you will be able to use Biblioscape efficiently right away.

You can order the book online with credit card. The book costs $15 including shipping and handling. The book size is 5.5x8.5 with 157 pages. Click here to order the book.

Open source WordPerfect scripts developed by Hugh Gunz

One of the main features of a bibliographic software is to format a manuscript by converting the temporary citations into formatted citations and bibliography. Biblioscape does this by reading in the Rich Text Format (RTF) file or HTML file produced by a word processor and generating the formatted document in RTF or HTML. Since RTF is supported by all word processors on Windows, this approach guaranteed that Biblioscape will work with all word processors. But there are two problems: First, RTF is very inefficient in saving graphics and OLE objects. When there are graphics and OLE objects in a document, Biblioscape can become very slow during formatting, or even hung up. Second, RTF is very well supported by Microsoft products like Word. But some word processors have problems with RTF supporting some rarely used features. The alternative approach is to do the formatting inside a word processor. Biblioscape generates the formatted references, while the word processor scripts (macros) do the formatting work. We first started this project with Professor Hugh Gunz to find a better solution for WordPerfect users. Biblioscape was modified to return formatted references through Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). Professor Gunz did all the WordPerfect script coding. We decided to make this an open source project, so other power users can improve the scripts, as well as porting it to other word processors like Word and OpenOffice. If you are a skilled script writer for Word, OpenOffice or other word processors and are willing to participate in this project, please email us at support@biblioscape.com.

Click here to download the WordPerfect scripts. Please read the Readme.wpd file first before use. You need to install the patch release if your copy of Biblioscape was installed before October 2002.

Latest Biblioscape 5 patch is available for download

You can now download the latest Biblioscape 5.2 patch at http://www.biblioscape.com/patch_readme.htm. There are several new features added and some bugs fixed.

Development

BiblioExpress 3 is under development

It has been a long time since the last version of BiblioExpress was released. We are now developing the next version of BiblioExpress. It will have the same database engine as Biblioscape 5. The Dynamic Folder in Biblioscape will be used in BiblioExpress. Other advanced interface features in Biblioscape will also be used. BiblioExpress will remain freeware. The design goal of BiblioExpress is to provide a tool for students and researchers to collect and manage bibliographic information. The new BiblioExpress will be able to handle large databases. But the import filters and output styles are very limited and are hard coded as the previous version. We plan to release BiblioExpress 3 before the end of this year.

Biblioscape Palm edition

Some users expressed interest for a Palm version of Biblioscape. We did some preliminary research and planned the following features for the Palm based program:

The Palm version will only handle bibliographic data.

The data sync between Palm and Biblioscape should be two-way sync.

Not all data fields in Biblioscape Reference table will be in the Palm version.

The Palm version won't support import filters and output styles.

If you are interested in discussing Biblioscape for Palm related issues, please email to support@biblioscape.com. We plan to start the Palm development work after BiblioExpress 3 is finished.