BibDesk 1.3 review

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BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X.

License: Freeware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 7144K
Developer: Michael McCracken
Price: $0.00
Updated: 13 Jan 2007
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BibDesk is a graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager for Mac OS X. BibDesk is designed to help organize and use bibliographic databases in BibTeX .bib format.

In addition to manual typing, BibDesk lets you drag & drop or cut & paste .bib files into the bibliographic database and automatically opens files downloaded from PubMed. BibDesk also keeps track of electronic copies of literature on your computer and allows for searching your database through several keys.

BibDesk integrates well with TeX for creating citations and bibliographies. This integration includes a Citation search completion service, and drag & drop (cut & paste) support for adding citations to TeX files.

BibDesk includes many features and has a great user interface.


Here are some key features of "BibDesk":
BibEditor now has a customizable toolbar
You can disable the status bar at the bottom of the document window
You can now customize BibTeX types by adding new types, adding/removing fields from existing types, or rearranging the order of fields in existing types
You can now customize the Unicode->LaTeX character conversion process by adding your own definitions
Double-clicking the splitview divider in the document window now collapses or expands the preview
You can sort the publications list by the order of items in the actual BibTeX file ("Number") Bugfixes
LaTeX previewing didn't work properly if the entry contained macros (bug #11755031)
A warning will be shown if character conversion fails when saving a document
Character conversion warnings weren't displayed for multiply-accented characters whose base character was a member of the ASCII character set
Added a View menu, and removed the Display menu. Some menu items were rearranged for better conformance with Apple HIG
Fixed various memory leaks
Use proper definitions of boolean types in Info.plist, so defaults will actually work
Changing a macro definition now updates the display properly (and much faster)
TeX commands and curly braces are now ignored for sorting
All search types now ignore curly braces
BibTeX type is now set properly when dragging BibTeX onto an editor window
Citekey is now set when option-dragging BibTeX onto an editor window
Saving with normalized names on will no longer insert editors into an author field (bug #1176433)
Remove BibFinder and connect cmd-F to quick search field; this fixes at least one crashing bug
Input manager now works properly with natbib optional parameters
Make font sizes in BibEditor form labels consistent
"Open Using Filter" history is now saved properly across launches
Documents imported using a filter are now properly marked as unsaved
Pub list is properly sorted after adding a new publication
Resizing problem with duplicate citekey warning should be fixed in the editor
Editor window should remember its size properly
Reworked search code for Services, which fixes bug #604338 (custom fields weren't searched), and #854414 (spaces in a search string were not recognized)
Fixed the type-ahead search in publications list (typing a partial author name selects a publication by that author)
Saving won't change focus from Annote/Abstract editing (bug #833430).

What's New:
Fixed bug #1558055, use cmd-opt-R as web import reload key equivalent, so it doesn't conflict with raw editing
Improved check for template format used in preview pane
Fixed template code to be 10.3 compatible
Multiple citekeys returned from the citekey service are now joined by a comma
Citekey service now returns original string when no match was found
Fixed bug #1558548, data loss occurred when saving a file as MacOSRoman under some conditions
Rich HTML export is no longer enabled on 10.3, since NSAttributedString doesn't have support for it
Fixed crash in editor when deleting a citekey and then generating it
Fixed crash when TeXification fails during saving on 10.4; NSError needs to be explicitly initialized when an error occurs.

Requirements:
A version of tex that outputs pdf (such as pdflatex) is required for the preview panel to work.

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