1. Interacting with OpenOffice.org
    1. Using the regular OpenOffice.org interface
    2. Using Bibus OpenOffice.org menu
      1. Make OpenOffice.org Writer listen using TCP/IP
      2. Inserting a citation
      3. Formating the bibliography
      4. Styles
        1. Using styles
        2. Creating a style
      5. Bibliographic index
        1. Fieds formatting
        2. Fields ordering
      6. Citation
      7. Further formatting
        1. Citation
        2. Bibliography

Interacting with OpenOffice.org

There are two ways to interact with OpenOffice.org, either through the regular interface integrated in the writer or through Bibus OpenOffice.org menu. You can use both depending on your needs and the two methods are perfectly compatible. For instance you can use the classical interface if you are working on a computer on which Bibus is not installed and continue on another computer with Bibus. You must however always use the same bibliographic database (MySQL or SQLite).

OpenOffice.org writer has an integrated bibliographic database and index. In order to be compatible, Bibus use this infrastructure but try to improve it when possible:

Using the regular OpenOffice.org interface

In order to make OpenOffice.org able to talk with MySQL and SQLite you must either use ODBC or JDBC. I will quickly describe how to use ODBC since I never tried with JDBC. You can have a look at installation.txt. If you speak French you can find many nice documents that explain everything at <http://fr.openoffice.org/Documentation/How-to/indexht.html>. There are other links available on the OpenOffice.org site.

You must first declare your ODBC source. I don't know how to do that under Windows, but I suppose there is a GUI tool. Under linux you must edit 2 files:

You can have a look at the end of installation.txt to see how they look on my debian system. You can use a GUI like gODBCConfig to easily configure ODBC.

Now, in OpenOffice.org:

OpenOffice.org fields

Using Bibus OpenOffice.org menu

On the screenshot below you can see OpenOffice.org running side by side with Bibus. The Bibus OpenOffice.org menu is also displayed. The citation key used is the Identifier that appears in Bibus. It is very readable since it contains the name of the first author followed by the year.
In order for Bibus to communicate with OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice.org must be listening for TCP/IP connection.
Since Bibus 0.8.1 you can either use TCP/IP connection or named pipe to communicate with OpenOffice.org.
If the OpenOffice.org and Bibus are on the same machine I would recommend to use a named pipe since it is much faster and more secure. The advantage of the TCP/IP connection is that it is network transparent and should work if Bibus and OpenOffice.org are run from different machines.
Under Windows98 it is highly recommended to use a named pipe since TCP/IP connection is very slow (to establish the connection takes about 20 s, but after that it will be faster and may be usable if you really need TCP/IP).
OOo menu

Make OpenOffice.org Writer listen using TCP/IP

There are several ways to accomplish that.
You can read "Make the office listen" at <http://api.openoffice.org/docs/DevelopersGuide/FirstSteps/FirstSteps.htm>
By default, Bibus use the port 8100. You can change this by choosing the menu OpenOffice.org/Settings...
For security reasons, don't forget to use a firewall and to block any connection to this port coming from the outside world.

Since Bibus 1.1.0, there is a OOo macro that help you to activate this connection. In the FirstStart Wizard, there is a button to activate the connection. You can also directly open the document "UnoConnectionListener.odg" located in $BIBUS/Setup/ in OOo. The document will look like:

UNO connection

Just click the "Accept UNO connections" button, quit OOo (including the quickstarted) and reload it. Normally bibus should now be able to insert citations in OOo. If in the OOo macro, you change the pipe name or if you select Socket, you will need to go to the bibus OpenOffice.org menu, choose "Settings..." and put the correct values.

Inserting a citation

Using the Bibus interface to insert citation is much easier than using OpenOffice.org interface. Indeed when using OpenOffice.org, you must find your citation in a flat list which may be very long. By Using Bibus, you just have to select your citation(s) and insert them directly at the cursor location. Further explanation shouldnt be necessary: just give it a try.
The only important point is that before insertion, the reference goes through the style filter. This means that the fields won't appear as in the database but will be reformatted. This is an important feature of Bibus and a strong improvement over OpenOffice.org.

Formating the bibliography

When you choose this menu Bibus makes two things:

How does Bibus recognizes a citation? For instance in the displayed ScreenShot, the Identifier of the inserted citation is Martineau1999#12. Bibus simply looks in the database for the record with Identifier=Martineau1999#12 and inserts it. Of course, this means that you must not change the database or Bibus will get confused and you will get the wrong reference inserted. Now if you want Bibus to not reformat a citation in your text, simply remove, for instance, the # character and Bibus will ignore the citation (But of course OpenOffice.org will still include it in the bibliographic index).

Styles

The styles functionality is still not complete but have been strongly improved in Bibus 0.9.
You can now:

All this is easily accomplished with Bibus styles.

Using styles

In the OpenOffice.org/Formating sub menu, there is a list of available styles. There are also options for creating, editing or loading styles from disk. The currently active style is displayed at the right of the status bar of the Main Window.
The list of styles is divided in two parts.

Creating a style

Creating or editing a new style is very easy. When you select New the following 'Style editor' will pop up.
style editor
You start with a style corresponding to the 'default' style of the style menu. This is a fairly reasonable style and most of the time you just have to modify few settings.
In this first Tab "Style information", You can put any relevant informations concerning this style. It is a good idea to give an e-mail address where users can contact you and of course for which journal the style is intended.

Bibliographic index

The second Tab controls how the index is formated. The choices are easy to understand and correspond to the available choices in OpenOffice.org.
style_index

Fieds formatting

This Tab controls the filters that are applied to the record fields before insertion in OpenOffice.org.
For instance, if you have a record with the corresponding authors:

Marx, Groucho; Marx, Harpo; Marx, Zippo; Marx, Zeppo; Marx, Gummo

you may want to format them as :

Marx G., Marx H., Marx Z., Marx Z., Marx G.

or

Marx G., Marx H., Marx Z., Marx Z. and Marx G.

style_fields
On the left, there is a list of all the available reference types that OpenOffice.org knows about. The main type is of course ARTICLE and it is why we use it as the default type. If you click on any other type, for instance BOOK, you will see that all the choices are dimmed and that the first RadioBox says that for BOOK you must 'Format fields as in ARTICLE'.
When you want to define a new style:

Fields ordering

The last Tab controls how the fields are ordered and formatted. For instance you may want to format references as:

Authors. Title. Journal (Year) Volume: pages.

This can be done in this Tab.
style_ordering

Citation

Starting with Bibus pre1.0.0, there is a new tab called citation.
In this tab, you can define the formatting of the citations in the text. This tab is a bit special because it contains features not supported by OpenOffice.org. The configuration option in this tab are used by the 'OpenOffice.org/Finalize' menu. Because it is a one-way formatting and because it is not possible to go back to the cancel these formatting, Bibus will use these setting on a copy of your current document.
citation_formatting
Here is a short description:

Top: You can define here, the style of the citation. Bold, italic, subscript, etc...

Depending on the settings in the 'Bibliographic Index' tab, you will be also able to define either the formatting of the numbering or author-date:

For author-date, you must first define the template (for instance 'Author', 'Year'), then how Bibus should try to solve the duplicates. There are 3 possibilities:
    - Bibus can add a letter after the year. This method will always generate unique citation markers.
    - You can choose to add authors or to add their firstname. In some case this may not be possible to solve all the duplicates. Bibus will warn you if there are still some duplicates and you will have to edit them by hand.
    - You can add a field. For instance, in APA style, you usually add the 'title' of the book after the author. Again, in some rare cases, it may not be enough to solve some duplicates. Again, Bibus will warn you if it is the case.

Further formatting

Read the OpenOffice.org help to understand how styles works in OpenOffice.org.
Bibus uses paragraph and character styles to format the bibliography and the citations.
You can thus re-format easily the citations and/or the Bibliography.

Citation

After using the Finalize function, the citations uses the character style 'bibus_citation_base'. For instance, you can choose a yellow background for this style and all the text citations will be easy to localize in you text.

Bibliography

The Bibliography title uses the paragraph style "Bibliography title"
The Bibliography uses the paragraph style "Bibliography 1"
The References use the character style "bibus_base"