Extrakting single entries from a bibliography

[Robby Stephenson]

On Thursday 24 July 2008, Christian Swertz wrote:
> I have one tellico file. This file contains all my literature. Now I'm
> writing different papers. Each papers refers to some of the entries in
> the tellico file. I would like to collect these entries and export them
> with citation formating, and keep this collection as a list in tellico
> for later use or for beeing able to work with different lists at the same
> time (since I'm working on different papers at the same time). This is
> not possible yet, isn't is?

Oh, there's a (relatively) painless way to do that. Select the entries you 
would like to export them, FIle->Export and choose the "Export selected 
entries" option. For an easy way to only select certain entries, you could 
add a checkbox field for a literature list, then create a filter for that 
field. Then when you select that filter, and do "Select All", only those 
entries with that field checked will get exported. Or, if you have a lot of 
lists, just add a new multiple choice field with different tags and do the 
same.

> > No, there's no citation formatting available.
>
> OK. Maybe I can do something to make this available in tellico? I really
> like KDE and tellico. Since I'm working in a university, one of the
> things I need in KDE is a literature database, and I think tellico does a
> great job with the keyword and author name handling and online
> cababilities and so on. The only thing I'm missing is a way to get the
> literature lists for my papers out of tellico. I have some experiences in
> programming (not exactly C++, but that's something I can learn) and some
> knowledge about citation formatting. You think there is a chance for me
> to add this?

Sure, if you want to give it a shot. I'll be glad to give you some pointers 
if you need specific help. I see a couple of options:

1. Formatting independent of Tellico. In this case, you export to bibtex or 
some other existing format and then, as Jens suggested, figure out how to 
format the citations from there. Zotero is a firefox plugin that has a 
large citation support and can import bibtex.

2. Use DCOP with a script. Tellico has a DCOP interface, 
http://periapsis.org/tellico/doc/dcop-interface.html and you could probably 
script a bibtex export and citation (as in option 1) and bind that to a 
shortcut key or something.

3. Jump into c++ programming and create a new export class to wrap whatever 
code you end up using to create the citation. This would be the most 
complicated, and I'd urge you to figure out how you'd actually be creating 
the citation first.

I hope that helps a bit!
Robby