Migration from Pages '09 and Endnote X7

[ky2larob]

I have about 8 files, of 5,000 words each, that I've generated in Pages '09 using Endnote x7 for my doctoral thesis. I am becoming increasingly unhappy with Pages 9 and Endnote for academic work and longer documents. I feel like it is time to jump off this doomed train. I would like to move to Mellel and Bookends. I like what I see as I have been using the trial versions and watching the tutorials. However, I am having trouble migrating my current files. I have tried importing my Pages documents to Mellel as MS Word documents, RTFs and Text files. I can get the body just fine. However, all of the footnotes are jumbled together on the last page, after the bibliography. I tried importing the references to Bookends and scanning the document. I don't see a change.

Any ideas on how I can make the migration? Thank you!

[Bulow]

Can't you just change the position of your notes? After importing into Mellel, go to 'insert' > note > edit note attributes and then change 'position' from 'end of document' to 'bottom of page'. Unless there is a very special problem in your imported texts, this ought to do the trick.
Bulow

[ky2larob]

Hi Bulow. Thanks for the idea. That didn't seem to change anything. In the body of the text, there are no notes showing up. For example, at the end of sentence, there is no superscript "1" to indicate that there is a footnote. However, the contents of all the footnotes are stacked up, without numbering, at the end of the document.

Again, that for the idea.

[Bulow]

I know neither Pages nor Endnote, nor the combination of the two, so they may do things that I am unfamiliar with. Anyway, can you get the whole thing, with notes and references, correctly into a Word-document? If you can, save this as rtf and then import the rtf into Mellel (not just opening it with Mellel, but importing it). The problem I think you are facing has often been addressed in this forum, namely that Mellel uses the standard rtf transformer of OS X which blithely cuts away footnotes as if there had never been any. In fact, you are lucky that they appear at the end, even if the links have been cut. If you let Word do the transformation into rtf, the problem ought to go away and you can then proceed as I advised to have the notes at the bottom of the page.
If you cannot get a correct version in Word (or Nisus or whatever) with the notes linked to references in the text, I am afraid you will have to redo the notes, which is a drag.
Keep us informed
Bülow

[nicka]

What is happening at the moment, I suspect, is that the notes are being transformed into something else: just a list at the end of the document, no longer note objects connected to the numbers in the main text.

I think that Bulow is almost but not quite right about the cause and solution. The problem is that Pages only has good support for .doc (import and export) and Mellel only has good support for importing .rtf. So you should export from Pages to doc format, open in Word, Open Office, or Nisus Writer and save as rtf, then open in Mellel. You should find that this properly preserves footnotes and endnotes.
You will, however, lose paragraph styles: not the styling itself, but labelling of each paragraph with a style. If you use paragraph styles, you'll need create some in Mellel and impose them on the text. The Replace Styles dialogue may help, or you may find it faster to go through the document and do it manually.

[ky2larob]

Thanks for all those replies. You were right in some of those techniques. I had to export it from Pages as a Microsoft Word document. I opened it Open Office and exported it as an RTF document. I then imported it to Mellel (not merely opened it). It brought in my notes without issue. I had to change the page set up from landscape to portrait. Wasn't tough. As a caveat to those who may read this afterwards: In doing this, the footnotes come in as the "finished product." They won't come in as {AUTHOR, #898}. The footnotes will have to be changed to this format, one by one. At least as near as I can tell.

Thanks again. I appreciate the help.