I use JabRef to compile and maintain BibTeX bibliographies, because while I could be all 1337 and hack them together by hand, this would be extremely painful and not as easy to sort or take in at a glance as using a GUI. However, JabRef, while an excellent program, still shows signs of its origins in the shadowy underbelly of Java applications. It won’t do things like open .bib files from the Finder, or by the open command, or any of those terrific shortcut ways of doing things that Mac users take for granted. So whenever I double-click on a .bib file, it opens in BibDesk. Which is a fine BibTeX editor, and I have lots of friends who use it, but it’s not my preferred program.
But once in a while, it chokes so hard for some unexplained reason that it completely garbage-izes your file and throws up a hilarious error message to let you know that it’s finished trashing every last byte of data in your 200-item bibliography, such as the following:
If BibDesk cannot open files in the “BibTeX” format, what the heck have I been working with all these years?
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24 April 2008 at 4:37 pm
Adam
As a BibDesk developer, I don’t think this is so funny. If you can reproduce it with the latest version, please file a bug report or send the file to me and I’ll take a look.
This error message could occur when using a version of BibDesk released last summer when run on Leopard, due to some unfortunate changes in Apple’s document type handling. As far as I know, it shouldn’t appear otherwise, and BibDesk should definitely not be “trashing every last byte of data” in your bibliography!