Forum

I have a long document that I have put together using Mellel and Bookends. When I output to PDF, everything looks excellent, except for a few minor details with my citations that I would like to clean up manually. For example, in some places I mention the name of the author to whom I am referring in the body of my text and it is then immediately repeated in the citation. The guidelines I am required to use (MLA Style) state that the name can be omitted in the citation if already obvious. In a few other cases, punctuation ends up in the wrong place, with periods falling outside of quotation marks rather than inside them as I would like. I don't think I can make these kinds of edits to the temporary markers that Bookends uses.

I am wondering if there is a way to finalize all citations in the document, i.e., convert them to editable text rather than the temporary markers that Bookends uses?

In my limited experience you can edit text scanned into your document by Bookends just as if it were regular text, as long as the document remains in its scanned state. I suspect you'd simply lose your edits if you did a subsequent unscan but I haven't checked this, so try things out on a copy of your original document. Citations and footnote text will retain the purple overlay despite your editing, but that doesn't print in any case.

Not sure it helps, but you can individually exclude some citations from the final document. Just double-click on the citation and select "exclude". The citation will be displayed in the bibliography, but not in the final document. This way, you can place the citation at the end of the paragraph and avoid blank spaces.

joseph_anton wrote: ↑Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:51 pm everything looks excellent, except for a few minor details with my citations that I would like to clean up manually

If the Bookends format you use is correctly formatted, you shouldn't need to clean up the output manually.

in some places I mention the name of the author to whom I am referring in the body of my text and it is then immediately repeated in the citation. The guidelines I am required to use (MLA Style) state that the name can be omitted in the citation if already obvious.

In other words, it seems you are writing a text that looks something like this:
According to John Doe, this can be easily achieved. {Doe, 1980, #56157@24}

and you want it to look something like this, after it has been scanned:
According to John Doe, this can be easily achieved. (24)

Since you have already typed the author's name in the body of your text shortly before, the trick, if you use the MLA Style, is NOT to create any temporal citation here with Bookends at all, but instead type "(24)" manually into your manuscript.

NB
You will need at least one John Doe citation from Bookends though in order to have him appear in the bibliography at the end of the document. In the unlikely event you mention him only once in the whole document, you could use a removable in-tex citation, for example:

According to John Doe (1980) {!Doe, 1980, #56157@24}, this can be easily achieved.

After scanning, this would look like:

According to John Doe (1980), this can be easily achieved.

When scanned, the exclamation mark after the opening delimiter will hide the citation, but makes sure notwithstanding that the full reference is included in the bibliography.

In a few other cases, punctuation ends up in the wrong place, with periods falling outside of quotation marks rather than inside them as I would like. I don't think I can make these kinds of edits to the temporary markers that Bookends uses.

Are you talking about citations with quotation marks, like in titles of journal articles? If yes, then you can fine-tune this in Bookends with the Formats Manager. There you just need to replace ". with ." where the closing quotation is.

Thanks to everyone who responded to this thread with suggestions. I've made some progress and would just like to respond to a few points.

First, thanks for the information that it is possible to simply manually edit the citations produced by Bookends. I had somehow missed this feature up to now. However, the trouble with this is that as soon as you re-scan the document, everything reverts to the way it was. If you're dealing with a 100,000 word document, it takes time to go through the whole thing and adjust.

Just to clarify what I mean regarding MLA Style, I have my Bookends citations set up to give me something like this:

As Freud mentions in Totem and Taboo, in the Solomon Islands, "after his marriage a man may neither see nor converse with his mother-in-law" (Freud, Totem and Taboo ch. 1).

What I want is this:

As Freud mentions in Totem and Taboo, in the Solomon Islands, "after his marriage a man may neither see nor converse with his mother-in-law" (ch. 1).

Oddly enough, the modifier to "Exclude authors and title [&]" when entering the Bookends citation seems to work inconsistently for me. Sometimes it will suppress this information, sometimes it won't. As Icelander says, I could simply type (ch. 1) but I like having real Bookends references in my text that will still work if I cut and paste the text or change what comes before it. It might be nice if there were some option to over-ride the citation produced by Bookends in a persistent manner that would survive a re-scanning of the document.

Incidentally, some of the problems I was running into were solved by cleaning up my Bookends custom formats to address issues such as commas falling outside quotation marks instead of inside.

joseph_anton wrote: ↑Tue Nov 06, 2018 7:21 pm It might be nice if there were some option to over-ride the citation produced by Bookends in a persistent manner that would survive a re-scanning of the document.

As far as I can see, the only way to avoid this is to have Live Bibliography turned on from the very beginning. Live Bibliography seems to make re-scanning obsolete; and as long as there is no re-scanning, the manually performed changes will stick.

Oddly enough, the modifier to "Exclude authors and title [&]" when entering the Bookends citation seems to work inconsistently for me. Sometimes it will suppress this information, sometimes it won't.

I also noticed that the methods described in Bookends User Guide p. 245ff do not always work in Mellel as expected. The citation {&Freud, 2001, #22392 \chap. 1\}, for example, works without an hiccup in Nisus, but Mellel can't find the reference and asks me to confirm which reference in Bookends I want. Seems \chap. 1\ throws Mellel off track. I'm not complaining, because Live Bibliography seems to outbalance this drawback.

Icelander wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:44 pm As far as I can see, the only way to avoid this is to have live bibliography turned on from the very beginning. Live bibliography seems to make re-scanning obsolete; and as long as there is no re-scanning, the manually performed changes will stick.

Thanks for your input, Icelander. I think that with Live Bibliography turned on, there is a re-scan of the citations each time the Mellel document is re-opened, meaning that manual edits will be over-written.

joseph_anton wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 7:32 pm with Live Bibliography turned on, there is a re-scan of the citations each time the Mellel document is re-opened, meaning that manual edits will be over-written.

I see now you're absolutely right! Thanks for pointing this out.
Hmm (scratching my head)… I wonder whether this is a bug. I can't think of any justification for this behavior. It's counterproductive.

I think I can see a possible justification. Styles like MLA undergo small changes over time, changes Bookends reflects in its updates. Suppose you’ve got a long document you work on over a long period of time and maintain using Live Bibliography. Without something along the lines of rescan on open, the formatting of older entries might eventually be inconsistent with the newest definition of MLA and with the formatting of entries added to the document later on.