Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 87162
OpenOffice.org for law students and lawyers
Last modified: 2008-03-18 06:26:27 UTC
Appellate briefs need Tables of Authorities . For the non-lawyers out there, a ToA is a kind of sectioned bibliography for lawyers: it indexes all the various citations used in a document by type of authority (constitutions, statutes, regulations, case law, secondary authorities, etc.). MS Word and WordPerfect have table-of-authority builders built right into the program. Essentially, the ToA builder goes through the whole document, looking for anything that might look like it's a citation. Once it finds a possible citation, it stops: the user can then mark the citation and add it to an index. In the end, you end up with something that looks like this: TABLE OF AUTHORITIES BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 273 U.S. 177, 93 F.2d 14 (1953)...................1, 2 There, you see Brown, its full citation in Blue Book format, and the pages where it's cited. Now, OpenOffice and LaTeX should be able to do a simple trick like this--and do it better. But they're structurally different programs. Instead of treating the document like one long stream of text, they use a "structured document" model. Theoretically, the structured document should be better: you define the logical parts of your document and let the program deal with all the fiddly character-by-character design issues. To make this work, you need to have a separate bibliographic database, and then insert tagged references into the document as you go. Sounds good, right? Wrong. In OpenOffice, as in TeX, it's the bibliographic package (bibtex or some such) that generates the formatted citation. And, wouldn't you know it--there aren't any style files out there.
Already tracked as issue 32712. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 32712 ***
Cosing duplicate.