[Papyrus-L] where to next?

[Hugh Gunz]

Andrew Wilson's experiences match ours; for many purposes Biblioscape seems 
to be the best of a not very good bunch. We've modified the RIS OUT format 
to include the fields that are omitted from the original format, and we've 
produced a version of the Biblioscape import filter that processes them, 
although I'm sure they could be improved on. Anyone's welcome to them, for 
what they're worth.

>2. Other programs seem to insist on numeric dates. So dates like "1992-1993"
>are problematic, also "forthcoming 2002" and "in press". The import to
>Biblioscape just omits these so the date is blank.

Could you use the "Date_freeform" field? I think that was what it was 
created for in Biblioscape 4. Admittedly this would be a bit clumsy: 
presumably you could set the import filter so that it puts the date in both 
the "Year" field and the "Date_freeform" field, so that if the former can't 
accept the date, it will still go into the latter. But that might require 
messing around with the output filter as well when it comes to formatting 
bibliographies. Not elegant.

>3. I haven't yet found a way to import notecards into Biblioscape. The
>suggestion recently posted on this list that you could put them in the Notes
>field of a reference won't work if you have multiple notecards for some
>references.

Actually, that isn't too serious a problem: any number of notecards can go 
into the Notes field (it can take 256 MB of data, or something like that). 
Of course you lose the field-by-field formatting of the notecards that 
Papyrus gave them, unfortunately.

Hugh Gunz
University of Toronto