Like a few of you, I'm using Mellel to write my PhD thesis. I am in the final weeks before I need to submit my final draft to my committee and am hoping that everything will fall into place where it belongs. I've had the usual difficulties with trying to provide an export compatible with Word for my supervisor to add comments in Track Changes, and also getting things to always work well between Mellel and Bookends (another life saver, IMO!). I have a couple of questions for any out there who "know it all and can prove it".
1. I have used various documents initially in creating a final product and now discover that some of my footnotes, when the bib and refs and scanned with Bookends do not have the Journal titles and Book titles show up in italic script. What am I missing? I've checked the bib format, which seems to show that it is set up properly with the "J" or "T" in italic to show how to format the title, but it doesn't turn out right…
2. I have a number of appendices which are Numbers (Mac) spreadsheets (not Excel). They are complicated and extensive, so there's no way that I'm re-doing any of them. I've been trying to get my head around how to append these to my document and think that in the end I may just append them through pdf, as my final submission will likely be an export to pdf. Has anyone had any good experience with this?
3. I've had troubles, like so many others, in creating captions for my figures (images). In the end, I'm settling for creating a separate pdf document with a caption created in a pdf write software program, then I'll import that creation as my image so that it will be imported with the caption already on it. if anyone has any suggestions on how I might do this better, I'd be grateful.
One of the big attractions for me with Mellel was the ease with which I can shift direction and language capabilities. There's a lot of Arabic (right to left) in my document and it's worked a charm, thanks to the Hebrew background Mellel comes with!
PhD thesis with Mellel/Bookends/Numbers
Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler
Re: PhD thesis with Mellel/Bookends/Numbers
1) In Bookends, double check to make sure the Book type in the format manager is properly formatted. Also, make sure the output format is as 'Styled Text'. Go to Biblio -> Bibliography -> Then make sure 'Styled Text' is chosen after 'as' under the format.
2) No idea about Numbers, but one method might be to print the tables as pdf, then just insert them into your Mellel document. I had lots of tables in my dissertation as well. I think I copied one column at a time from Excel to a Mellel table, and it worked ok.
3) I have dozens of figures in my dissertation. Even though the figure captions aren't tied to the figures (which would be very nice), I really just didn't have that much trouble. I just typed a caption underneath the figure and applied the Figure Auto-title. For the most part, inserting figures in-line and making sure to wrap text above and below tend to yield better results, though there is some toying to be done.
2) No idea about Numbers, but one method might be to print the tables as pdf, then just insert them into your Mellel document. I had lots of tables in my dissertation as well. I think I copied one column at a time from Excel to a Mellel table, and it worked ok.
3) I have dozens of figures in my dissertation. Even though the figure captions aren't tied to the figures (which would be very nice), I really just didn't have that much trouble. I just typed a caption underneath the figure and applied the Figure Auto-title. For the most part, inserting figures in-line and making sure to wrap text above and below tend to yield better results, though there is some toying to be done.
Re: PhD thesis with Mellel/Bookends/Numbers
Thanks, SDempsey for your suggestions. I still can't seem to figure out what the trouble is with Bookends, as some references are working properly and others not. It must have something to do with settings that I changed at one point in the document and didn't realize what I was doing. I've pretty much got the figure/image thing worked out, and will play around with them in the final stages of the paper when all the textual work is finished. About the spreadsheets and pdfs, that's exactly what I was planning to do, just need to make sure I get the right page numbers on the spreadsheets to ensure they line up with the numbering in the document. Mellel is great, but gets better when you actually know how to use it well.
Re: PhD thesis with Mellel/Bookends/Numbers
For Bookends, did you import the references from some file, or did you manually enter them? If you manually entered them, did you copy and paste into the "Title" field of the book? If so, that carried the character formatting with it. There are a couple of ways to fix that. In the section of the window with all of the various fields for each reference, right click in the title field and choose to remove styles from that field. If it removes the text as well, just try typing in the book title manually and see if that works. There is also a way to do this en masse.
Here is a thread that I started on the Sunnysoftware (the makers of Bookends) forums with a very similar question. https://www.sonnysoftware.com/phpBB3/vi ... f=2&t=3467
That forum is an excellent place for Bookends support because Jon is awesome!
Regarding the spreadsheets, why don't you just insert the pdfs into Mellel (by inserting it as an image) and let Mellel take care of the page numbering? Mellel handles inserted pdfs very well.
Here is a thread that I started on the Sunnysoftware (the makers of Bookends) forums with a very similar question. https://www.sonnysoftware.com/phpBB3/vi ... f=2&t=3467
That forum is an excellent place for Bookends support because Jon is awesome!
Regarding the spreadsheets, why don't you just insert the pdfs into Mellel (by inserting it as an image) and let Mellel take care of the page numbering? Mellel handles inserted pdfs very well.
