Also "solves" #534.

I need to investigate further. In #110 I identified the bibtex VM (net.sf.jabref.bst.VM), which can handle bsts. Seems to be very complete. I am aware that citastionstyles (see #119) is the successor of bst files. I am currently unsure, whether citation styles really cover all cases and if users can easily switch.

In the case of biblatex vs. citationstyles, I am pretty sure that biblatex is more powerful. When reading the documentation of biblatex-apa, I don't think that a 621 line XML can have the same functionality. But you can convince me of the opposite. - I know that this doesn't help in the bst vs. citation styles case though.

Could you say a few words about the expected funtionality behind insertBST or is it a mystery? 😇

Well, it's got a hard coded .bst file in it:

wrapper.loadBstFile(new File("/home/usr/share/texmf-tetex/bibtex/bst/ams/amsalpha.bst"));

The other indication of incompleteness is BstWrapper.java with the following method:

public Map<String, String> processEntries(Collection<BibEntry> entries, BibDatabase database) {
        // TODO: how to handle uniquefiers?

        // TODO: need handling of crossrefs?
        String result = vm.run(entries);
        return parseResult(result);
    }

In addition, IEEEtran.bst introduces lots of additional LaTeX-commands, so the cleaning provided in parseResult will not take you that far. While the idea of using .bst is excellent, in this case I think it is still better to define reference style through the other definition files.

(I've been thinking about generating previews using .bst, but cleaning up the .bbl is a mess in the general, or at least the IEEEtran.bst, case and the same thing is bound to happen here. For previews, I think a feasible way is to generate a PNG/PDF and display it, but that won't really be of any use here.)

Also, there's not even commented out menu items etc or any configuration.

An option would also be to keep the .bst-stuff but get rid of the push-to-application-button (and other commented out things, there are three potential buttons which are not used). Will also simplify things a bit.

Seems like the final commit solves #607 if nothing else.

Should we open an issue then which reads "Add bst support for OpenOffice" referencing this PR?

Regarding the previews: I assume, you mean the preview panel? I thought, the BibtexVM can be used as is for that?

Yes, I think it makes sense to open an issue.

Yes, the VM can be used, but for some .bst-files (e.g. IEEEtran.bst) there will be quite a bit of non-trivial latex code to parse...