Re: Alpha version of RefDB menu

Hi Markus,

(cc'ing you directly because I'm not sure how quickly mail is going
through to SF lists)

You wrote:

> Hi Michael,
> 
> thanks a lot for the code. I've checked it out today. The first tests
> look promising. I've tried everything I could, and so far everything
> works as expected. Nice piece of work.

Great -- good to hear that it's working

> One minor thing I've noted though is that in some queries the
> *refdbc-output* buffer does not pop up. Instead you see the result in
> the minibuffer, although *refdbc-output* is updated properly. Is Emacs
> doing this by design?

Yeah. And I don't know a good way to change that behavior. Doc for
shell-command-on-region says:

  If the output is short enough to display in the echo area (which is
  determined by the variable `max-mini-window-height' if
  `resize-mini-windows' is non-nil), it is shown there, but it is
  nonetheless available in buffer `*Shell Command Output*' even though
  that buffer is not automatically displayed.  If there is no output, or
  if output is inserted in the current buffer, then `*Shell Command
  Output*' is deleted.

Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of would be to have
it set max-mini-window-height to 1 (=1 line). But that would affect
global behavior, and I think some people wouldn't like that a whole lot.

> We (you?) need to figure out a way to select the input and output
> types. It would be nice to auto-detect the input type, i.e. append a
> -t risx to the addref command if the current buffer uses an XML mode,
> and append nothing if the current buffer uses the RIS mode.

Sounds doable, but I'd need to figure out how to do it.

> The output type would have to be selectable via the menu. Currently
> scrn (the default), html, xhtml, db31, db31x, teix, ris, risx are
> supported. This option is also invoked with a -t <type> on the getref
> command line.

That should be pretty easy to do. I can add a submenu with menu items
for each output type, like this:

  Select Output Type
    Screen
    HTML
    XHTML
    DocBook SGML
    DocBook XML
    TEI XML
    RIS
    RIS XML

How does that sound?

By the way, the docs say the bibtex is also a valid type. Should I
include that too?

  --Mike

> Michael Smith writes:
>  > I've just checked in the initial version of the refdb-menu.el package
>  > into the RefDB project CVS (in the 'elisp' directory at the root,
>  > parallel to the perlmod and refdb modules). It's also attached.
>  > 
> [...]
>  > Please try it out and let me know if it works at all for you at this
>  > point.

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