[This entry is now deprecated, please see Thunderdell (Freemind Extract) .]
I've been using the Freemind mind-mapper to represent my readings . While I'm not terrible fond of Java — startup/exit are very slow and I prefer Python obviously — the application is very nice. Fortunately, the data format is in XML, though a rather odd schema, so I can easily go at it with Python and xmltramp regardless.
Freemind extract relies upon a particular patterns.xml (in tar ball below) and certain conventions in the mind-map to create bibtex or OpenOffice.org CSV files.
- Authors are green and bound to F3.
- Titles are navy blue and bound to F4.
- Excerpts are blue and bound to F5.
- Annotations are purple and bound to F6.
- Abstracts are gray and bound to F7.
- Citations are magenta and bound to F8.
- My comments are left black, or F1
A citation node looks like "
y=2000 p=Basic Books a=New York,
NY
".
The resulting OpenOffice.org semi-colon delimited file will have this entry (many thanks to David Wilson for answering my many questions):
"Lessig 2000";"1";"New York, NY";;"Lessig, Lawrence";;;;;;;;;;;;;"Basic Books";;;"Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace";;;"2000";;;;;;;;
The BibTex entry will look like:
@book{Lessig2000,
address = {New York, NY},
author = {Lawrence Lessig},
publisher = {Basic Books},
title = {Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace},
year = {2000},
}
The tar file includes these utilities:
- be.py: extract a MM from a bibtex file (dependent on bibstuff )
- de.py: extract a MM from a dictated text file
- fe.py : extract bibliographic data from bibliographic MM (dependent on xmltramp )
- ff.py: fix the case of titles of a bibliographic MM
- te.py: parse inconsistently formatted textual bibliographies into bibliographic MM (e.g., from syllabi, cb2Bib is cool too)