Enhance "Recommended" settings for field formatters (which are e.g. used to cleanup entries)

[ThiloteE]

Prerequisites

1. Be a beginner.
2. Have a library with bibliographic metadata.
3. Know nothing about UTF8 and encoding.
4. Know you want to use this library with LaTeX, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice/LibreOffice or other external programs.

Problems:

1. Bibliographic data is formatted the "wrong" way (especially after import from external databases).

   • in other words:
     • it can be that this data cannot be read with LaTeX engines
     • or vice versa, it will create wrong output when exporting to OO/LO
     • or MS-Word
     • or using this data for HTML
     • or ...

   Hence the need to (manually or automatically) format the data into the "proper" format depending on which external program is supposed to be used. We have some field formatters for this. They are utilized by cleanup actions (field formatters as can be seen in Enhance "Recommended" settings for field formatters (which are e.g. used to cleanup entries) #8790 (comment)) and save actions. Cleanup actions can be found in the UI via Quality > Cleanup entries (ALT + F8). Save actions can be found via right clicking on the library tab and choosing library properties > saving > save actions. Typical examples for field formatters are latex2unicode or unicode2latex, but there are more.

2. There are (too) many field formatters that all would manually have to be set up.

Draft Solution:

1. Enhance "recommended" settings for field formatters.

   • Recommended (default) settings were introduced in an earlier version of JabRef via Create sensible default settings for "Enable save actions" and "Cleanup" dialogs #2051

2. Go beyond what the older feature could do: Give recommended settings for various "states" the library could be in.

   Example:

   state	program user wants to use	recommended cleanup actions / save actions
   Data formatted in LaTeX syntax	OpenOffice/LibreOffice	LaTeX2Unicode, normalize date, ...
   Data formatted in UTF8 syntax	LaTeX	Unicode2LaTeX, normalize date, ...
   Data formatted in LaTeX syntax	UnicodeAwareLaTeX	LaTeXtoUnicodAwareLaTeX (does not yet exist. See Add cleanup action for "LaTeX to LaTeX aware Unicode" #8715 though, ...
   Data formatted in UTF8 syntax	Microsoft Word	no change (i think?)
   Data formatted in UTF8 syntax	OpenOffice/LibreOffice	no change (i think?)
   ...	...	...

   Maybe it would be good to tie this to library modes, but I am not sure how that could look like exactly...

Additional context

• There was a less thorough attempt at alleviating the situation in Rename cleanup actions: "Prepare for LaTeX" and "Prepare for BibTeX" #8672.
• Another related issue: Adopt recommended file save actions upon database mode change #5579
• Maybe connect this also to work with the integrity checker. This would be tracked Connect Integrity Check with Cleanup Actions #8736. The integrity checker could detect the "state" or the mode the library is in and notify users about compatibility.

[Siedlerchr]

Is that what you mean?

[ThiloteE]

Ah sorry, yes. field formatters. My bad. Will edit my post.

[ThiloteE]

Should be better now :-)