JabCon 2018

Last week the annual JabCon took place in Dresden, Germany, where the majority of the JabRef developers met in person and worked together to improve JabRef and discuss the roadmap for future releases. As some of you might have already seen, we implemented some new features, fixed and closed a lot of issues. We could successfully reduce the number of open issues to 128 from previously over 190 open issues. Managing, categorizing and sorting issues is a very time consuming task that takes away valuable programming time, so consolidating the list of existing issues is very important once in a while. Now, we are ready to focus on important issues and to move on with JabRef more quickly. We are currently working on a new version containing the results of our hacking sessions.

Some highlights of the things we fixed:

• We fixed a nasty bug with the space character in the entry editor which led the cursor to jump to the beginning of a field #3471
• We fixed an issue where odd linked files could not be selected in the entry editor #3639
• We made the Google Scholar fetcher work again
• We fixed an issue where the semicolon could not be used as a keyword separator for automatic groups #3646
• We fixed some export issues where the last used filetype was not remembered and the exporter asked twice about overriding a file #3693
• We fixed an issue when importing the ISI fileformat #3669
• The entry editor now supports encoded DOIs koppor#3
• The default language (LCID) for exporting to MS-Office XML is now set to American English (0x0409) #1851
• We improved the design of the File Annotations Tab #3109

Furthermore, we did some internal code changes to improve the code quality.

Our future plans include the migration to JavaFX of some core components. Especially the maintable and the MainFrame. Another big action point on our roadmap is getting JabRef to run on Java 9, including a modularization of the source code.

We would like to thank the organizers @koppor, @stefan-kolb, @lenhard and SAP SE Dresden, Dresden, Germany for providing us with an on site location for the conference Furthermore we would like to thank our donators who made it possible for many JabRef developers to attend the conference and to support our work. In case you like to donate money on a regularly basis, you can now support us on Liberapay.