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Anyone else using Bookends and care to comment?

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 3:57 pm
by joseph_anton
I have a quite long and complex document, which I've been working on in Mellel + Bookends for some time now. Recently, I've been experiencing intermittent problems with the formatting instructions sent from Bookends not being followed when the citation is copied over into Mellel, e.g. where a book title should be italicized, it copies over in the regular font. Even instructions such as "Exclude Authors and Title" in Bookends' "Special handling of final citation" are not being followed.

The strange thing is that if I create a new Mellel document and try to insert the same in-text citations in it from Bookends, it works flawlessly. This leads me to think that some issue must have developed in the Mellel document which I am working on that is interfering with the correct formatting of in-text citations. I don't know of any equivalent in Mellel to the Repair and Rebuild options that are available in Bookends for dealing with database corruption. If anyone has any troubleshooting tips, I'd be most grateful if you could share them!

Re: Anyone else using Bookends and care to comment?

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 8:47 pm
by ealvarez
I use Bookends too, but in this case your best option would probably be the "support" directly from the Redlers. There is something tricky ;)

Re: Anyone else using Bookends and care to comment?

Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 4:43 am
by Icelander
Hello Joseph,
I've been experiencing intermittent problems with the formatting instructions sent from Bookends […] where a book title should be italicized […] The strange thing is that if I create a new Mellel document and try to insert the same in-text citations in it from Bookends, it works flawlessly.
Are you sure you haven't (accidentally) mapped the citation and bibliography styles in Edit > Bibliography > 'Bib & Cit. style Mapping' for the long document? Mapping can be turned on and off on an individual basis. That could explain why this is happening in one document and not in another.
Even instructions such as "Exclude Authors and Title" in Bookends' "Special handling of final citation" are not being followed.
Are you referring to temporary citations like this one: {&Jones et al., 2006, The title}, on p. 233 in the Bookends' manual?

You are right, this doesn't work in Mellel, and so doesn't creating removable in-text citation with ! either (p. 232.)
However, excluding cited references from the bibliography (p. 232.) using $, works.

While this all works beautifully in Nisus, the question for me is now, is this *supposed* to work in Mellel? When you enter '&' in front of the citation in Mellel, the temporary citation turns into an unverified citation. If you then verify it (by using the verify button in the bibliography palette, the citation is verified and '&' is REMOVED from the citation, thus preventing it to do its job when the document is finally scanned.

It seems if you want to use "Exclude Authors and Title" in Mellel, you must double click on the temporary citation and edit the citation in the upcoming Edit Citation Window (see p. 335 in Mellel's User Manual.) You can enable 'Exclude from final document' there.

Re: Anyone else using Bookends and care to comment?

Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 11:58 am
by joseph_anton
Thanks for the input, ealvarez and Icelander! To respond:

ealvarez:
I have opened a support ticket and am waiting on a reply from the good folks at RedleX. I thought it would be useful to know whether these problems are specific to me, or if others are also experiencing issues.

Icelander:
Thank you for your suggestion regarding style mapping, it put me on the track towards the solution to my main problem.

It seems that some areas of my document had slight variations on the Character Style I had defined for them (e.g. they were showing up as "Quote+" in the Character Styles palette). The formatting requests generated by Bookends were not being followed in these areas of the document. Once I re-applied the character style to the relevant area (e.g. so that the Character Style was now "Quote" for the entire paragraph), the issue was resolved.

Regarding the "Exclude authors and title" instruction, I have been invoking this as part of the citation entry process in Bookends. Pressing CTRL + Command + Y gives this as one of the options in the pull-down menu under "Special handling of final citation". Using Mellel with Live Bibliography turned on, this appears for me now as a verified citation but the instruction to suppress the names of the author and title in the final citation does not appear to be followed, although when I look at the temporary citation I can see that the "&" symbol is present.

The use case is that in the current version of MLA style, if the name of the author and text have already been mentioned and are obvious to the reader, only page numbers are necessary in the citation. So "Exclude from final document" is not exactly what I am looking for, as I do want page numbers to be shown.