I'm looking at using Biblioscape for my research. I no longer use Microsoft Office products. I am using OpenOffice. Is this program compatible with it? I can use Linux if necessary, since I have a dual boot desktop system. But my laptop is a Windows XP Professional product, and so I'd use Biblioscape on it, rather than my linux desktop system.
TIA,
Marie
Whether you use Linux or
Whether you use Linux or Windows makes very little difference, as long as you can get Biblioscape to run under emulation with Linux. Unfortunately you can't configure Biblioscape to integrate with OO in the same way that it does with Word, and Biblioscape can't handle the OpenDocument standard as it does Word documents. (Incidentally, since the standard is open, there is no reason why it shouldn't be possible in the future.)
But RTF is always possible. I've been working with OO and Biblioscape for years, and it works pretty well. Insert temporary citations into your OO document (either by copy & paste or by drag & drop), save a copy of the document as RTF, and use Biblioscape to format the citations and bibliography.
A good idea (but this applies to Word as well) is to keep graphics and fancy formatting to a minimum initially because RTF is limited in that respect, and to insert those features _after_ formatting the citations and bibliography. This is good practice from a DTP point of view anyway.
Another tip: Sometimes Biblioscape struggles to work with RTF files properly. In many cases, this is caused either by fancy formatting at the beginning or end of the document or by line breaks inserted inside temporary citations during RTF conversion. These things can easily be corrected in the RTF file when you encounter this problem.
Dennis
I've had success in the past
I've had success in the past with OpenOffice by converting the document file to rtf; Biblioscape can format that.