Tips and Frequently Asked Questions

Useful Tips

Frequently Asked Questions

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Useful Tips

Paste information from a web site rather than a PDF file.
Recently, most of papers can be obtained via web sites and PDF files. When you paste author names, titles of papers etc. to BibCompanion, it is recommended to copy those information from web sites rather than from PDF files. That is because, lots of times when pasting strings from a PDF file, the pasted string contains special (mostly invisible) control characters which may cause a problem to BibCompanion and also BibTeX. For example, super and subscripts and letters with accents (umlaut etc.) in a web site can be copied correctly, but those in a PDF file often fails because in a PDF file those letters are converted to internal expressions.
Controlling a smart paste function.
Smart paste function for author and title fields works fairly well but not perfect. For example, smart title paste can understand a chemical formula “Ga1-xAlxAs” as “Ga1-xAlxAs” but not “M1-xAlxAs” (just treated as a mixed expression of letters and numbers) because ‘M’ is not a chemical element. Of course you can edit manually, but here is an easier way to do by semiautomatic. First, paste the string to other text editor such as TextEdit and edit the string to what BibCompanion can understand. For example of the above, change the string to “Mo1-xAlxAs” (change ‘M’ to ‘Mo’ (molybdenum)) and paste it to BibCompanion that yields “Mo1-xAlxAs”. Then you just delete extra ‘o’ of ‘Mo’ to get a correct result.
How to get a list of complicated search results such as {(A and B) or (C and D)}?
A smart library applies either of AND or OR to all conditions and can not make a complicated conditions such as {(A and B) or (C and D)}. To obtain such a result, you can create a library group that includes two smart libraries such as shown below.
Sample
A library group works as OR operator, therefore, when you select the library group “{(A&B) or (C&D)}”, you can get desired result.
How to get a list of checked items?
Make a smart library with the following condition.
Sample
It works because a “mark” field is only created for checked items. This also works for other fields such as “url” etc. to find items with URLs.
Appending a small note to a format definition for list copy.
BibCompanion can holds several list format definitions for each bib type. For example, there are 3 definitions for <ARTICLE> type by default. To distinguish them, you can add small note to each definitions. Because BibCompanion ignores a bracketed block with undefined field, you can append a note block as follows:

[PhysRev<x>][<author>, ][<journal>][| <volume>][, <abbrev_pages>][ (<year>)][.]

The first block “[PhysRev<x>]” shows a note to this definition because the field name <x> never appears in a normal database.
I want to give write privileges to all users of a certain host. / I want to give write privileges to a certain user of any host.
When you get a write privilege of a database in the database property, both of user name and host name are set. Those information is saved in the first @COMMENT{} block of the database file. You can remove one of them to make a privilege to all user on one host or one user on any host. Be sure to backup your database before following the below procedure.
  1. Get a write privilege of the database.
  2. Close the database ([File - Close Database] menu, do not quit BibCompanion) then the database is removed from the database list.
  3. Open the database by a text editor such as TextEdit (the editor should be able to treat a text encoding used for the database, otherwise you may lost some information or break the database).
  4. Find a line “privileged_host = {HostName},” or “privileged_user = {UserName},”, here, ‘HostName’ and ‘UserName’ are host name of your Macintosh and your user name respectively.
  5. If you want to make a privilege to a certain user on all hosts, delete a line with “privileged_host”. For all users on a certain host, delete a line with “privileged_user”.
  6. Save the database and re-open from BibCompanion.
  7. Open property sheet of the database. You may see “UserName@(Any Host)” or “(Any User)@HostName” if the modification is succeeded.
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Frequently Asked Questions

Smart paste function does not work when overwriting paste was done. / Smart paste function does not work when short string was pasted.
Smart paste function only works when total length of the pasted field string extends by at least 5 letters. Therefore, when overwriting paste (make a selection before pasting) or short string paste was done, the function does not work. To workaround this problem, delete a selection before pasting a string.
How to use backuped database files such as xxxx.bib.1?
BibCompanion makes backup files as xxxx.bib.1, xxxx.bib.2... when it saves a database named xxxx.bib. These backups are for emergency use when the database was broken and can not be opened by BibCompanion or BibTeX. To use a backup file, just you do is to rename the file to the original one (remove an extra number with period). Then you can open it as usual.
I don't like to use <annote> field, but <keyword> instead.
By default, BibCompanion uses <annote> field for annotation (or keywords). You can change it to any field by the following way.
  1. Quit BibCompanion.
  2. Open user preferences folder (Home/Library/Preferences/) and search BibCompanion preference file (com.hit-c.BibCompanion.plist).
  3. For safety, make a copy of the preference file before modifying it.
  4. Open the preference file by a text editor such as TextEdit.
  5. Search a string “Annote Field Identifier”.
  6. Just below the string, you can find a line with “<string>annote</string>”.
  7. Change the name “annote” to what you want (i.g. “keyword”).
  8. Search a string “Search Fields for Annotes”.
  9. Just below the string, you can find lines surrounded by <array> and </array>.
  10. By default, annote, note, memo and keywords fields are listed here.
  11. If you do not find the field changed above, you can add (or replace) a field name such as “<string>keyword</string>”.
  12. Save changes and launch BibCompanion.
In the future version, you may change those setting via preferences dialog.
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