Bibdesk exporting?

October 23, 2007 5:25 PM

How do you export or convert BibDesk (or generally Bibtex) bibliographies in a specific format (like MLA, etc.)?

I'm having trouble figuring out how to copy it over as something besides Latex format. Is there an (easy) way to do this? I like the program's power, but I don't really use latex. Maybe it isn't worth it?

Also, another random bibdesk question while we're here: Can you really not supply publication location data? Seems like this is standard for books, but I don't see a field.

posted by names are hard to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

try zotero.org
posted by vautrin at 6:04 PM on October 23, 2007

I don't understand the question. BibDesk manages bibliography databases --- like, just the raw information about what a citation means --- it doesn't have any notion of specific bibliography formats like MLA or APA or whatnot. If you're preparing a document with LaTeX, another program (bibtex) handles taking a bibliography database and a specific document and making that document's bibliography in whatever style you choose. So I can read your question in two ways and I'm not sure which you intend: Do you mean that you want to manage your bibliography database using BibDesk but write your documents in something other than LaTeX? Or do you mean you want to write your documents in LaTeX but you don't know how to change the default bibliography style so that it's MLA?

I'm not sure about the former question, but for the latter you need to download a file called mla.bst and put it in the same directory as your latex file, and then add the line

\bibliographystyle{mla}

somewhere in the document (and remove any other lines that say \bibliographystyle{...}).
posted by jacobm at 6:29 PM on October 23, 2007

(Err, "but for the latter, to use (say) MLA style, ...".)
posted by jacobm at 6:47 PM on October 23, 2007

I think you can set bibdesk up to do what you want, more or less. You need to configure bibdesk so that it is able to use bibtex/latex to render the entries you want in the way you want. First, make sure latex is installed and set the paths so that bibdesk knows where it is (Typeset Preview preferences pane). (I have it in /usr/local/teTeX/bin/i386-apple-darwin-current/, but this depends on how you install it). Make sure the mla style file that jacobm links can be found by latex (the bibdesk manual suggests "~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bst"; I had to create that directory but it worked) and type "mla" in the box in the "preview" preferences pane. Now you can use the "preview" button to get a pdf and text preview, and if you right click on a selected entry or entries you get a "copy to text" option that should work, though you'll need to add back in underlines or whatever.

There's also something about "templates" in the preferences that looks like it might work for more formats (word, html), but I've never used this part of bibdesk.

Can you really not supply publication location data? Seems like this is standard for books, but I don't see a field.

I've always used the "address" field for this.
posted by advil at 7:44 PM on October 23, 2007

Oh, and I just tried the mla.bst file in particular to see if, y'know, my instructions work. In fact out of the box in bibdesk mla.bst doesn't work with a relatively cryptic error. What is missing is that this file depends on the natbib.sty file. So open the tex template (using the button in the preview pane), and add as the second line:

\usepackage{natbib}

Now you should be able to get things in mla format by copying entries as text.
posted by advil at 8:03 PM on October 23, 2007