Comments on: Tooling up to read, write and cite

By: A.

A. — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:59:59 +0000

As a lifelong Mac user and current masters student, I can completely relate. I am obliged to have Boot Camp installed for several GIS applications, but I am significantly more productive (& content) on this side of the partition. My transition to iWork has rendered me similarly impatient with Office programs, though - as you've found - I occasionally have to give up and go with the standard. That said, I'm very happy with Sente as a citation manager. Their support is seriously world-class. The few times I've encountered issues I couldn't resolve in the forums, I've received personal responses within hours of an email to customer support. When I inquired about a bibliography format that somehow wasn't among the multitude they offer, I was told that I could simply submit the format details and they would whip it up. Plus, no problem getting the student discount. Despite some weird Pages export-to-PDF font rendering quirks, I'm sticking to Pages/Sente/Skim. They're just such a pleasure to use.

By: David

David — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:33:18 +0000

I just sent some feedback to Apple re opening-up Pages to to (say) the Papers SDK.

By: David

David — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:25:04 +0000

The Pages bibtex looks as though it has died - last version dated at 2005-05-03 - and I've always been disappointed in the performance of OpenOffice.

I'd found the Papers + Word 2008 plugin thing earlier through Googling around and have been searching the Papers forums for a Pages plugin - maybe convince someone to make one ;-)

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 06:33:24 +0000

@D Pages 3.0.2 does open .docx but will export only to .doc. As you indicate, Word in Office 2004/ Office v. X requires the Open XML Converter add-on. Thanks for the link to the Pages citation helper; hadn't seen that but had been keeping an eye on Zotero for Firefox (currently subject to legal threats from EndNote) and the OpenOffice Bibliographic project. Did you follow the link for discussion re Papers + Word 2008's citation manager?

By: David

David — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:21:46 +0000

Just realised that my iPhone opens .docx files, whereas my older Word and Pages do not (without a converter)!

I will have to decide whether to go with iWork 08 or Office 2008 myself, although I much prefer Pages to Word and Keynote is better than Powerpoint, also I hear Numbers is really good. Just how to deal with all that citing and bibliography stuff if I use Pages... and then there is Nisus Writer to consider.

There was a Pages citation helper, but I never tried it, and though Papers does look impressive, I would be interested to hear how well the export to Word 2008 Bibliography actually works.

I suppose I will have to bow to the inevitable, and go the Word/Endnote route, despite the horrors I hear about Word 2008 screwing things up! I did my last dissertation purely in Word 10.1.8 - which was a fight at times!!

Oh, and I reinstalled Adobe Reader, because Preview will not deal with formulae, although I'm not saying Reader does it perfectly - grrrrrr!

By: David

David — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:04:39 +0000

EndNote must have the academia marker cornered! UoL