Style variations and formatted input from Bookends

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grebmar
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Post by grebmar »

I would second this notion. I am new to Mellel and Bookends and find them to be great products, but the styles problem from imported text needs to be resolved somehow, especially the text from Bookends. And, as far as I know, _all_ Mac programs use ad hoc styling, so importing any styled text presents this problem. Word manages to retain ad hoc styling on formatting changes, why can't Mellel?
Shayne
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Post by Shayne »

If one replaces character and then paragraph styles--and it must be in that order--using the replace styles menu, it seems possible to retain any and all formatting including italics from Bookends to Mellel.

Shayne
Ori Redler
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Re: Style variations and formatted input from Bookends

Post by Ori Redler »

frvs wrote:I’m cross-posting this message in the Mellel and Bookend forums to point out a somewhat frustrating issue. Because of Mellel’s distinction between ad hoc formatting and style variations, any formatted text Bookend sends to Mellel is prone to lose all formatting if there is any subsequent change in Mellel’s styles. This is a big issue if I want to change a style ever so slightly, because it means I may end up with, say, vanished italics in all citations and references. Is there any workaround anyone knows, short of re-scanning or applying style variations by hand to Bookends references?

Wishful thought: Is this not something both developers could work out as part of tighter integration between the two applications?
If I understand you correctly, the problem is with this scenario:
A. You set up the replacements for bold, italic, etc. in Preferences > Bibliography. E.g. anything in boldface sent by Bookends gets replaced with, say, Regular, variation: B
B. You change Regular so that variation B is no longer something in Bold but, instead, something in Red.
C. You end up after a scan with all your bold face cases from Bookends now looking red.

One way to control this is to have a style especially designed for that and only for that, with all the "right" formatting there.
Another, is to simply use a simple find and replace action, replacing any styling lost or changed.

I'm not sure how this is related to ad-hoc editing, though.
Ori Redler from RedleX
frvs
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Re: Style variations and formatted input from Bookends

Post by frvs »

Ori Redler wrote:If I understand you correctly, the problem is with this scenario:
A. You set up the replacements for bold, italic, etc. in Preferences > Bibliography.
Actually, my post is an old one. In the meanwhile, I learned to to what Ori is here assuming I already knew (but I didn't). I also learned the procedure shayne refers to (replacing character styles first, paragraph styles afterwards), which has been quite useful to me when converting styles from imported documents. So, my complaints regarding styles were actually the product of my ignorance and have vanished in the meanwhile (though not my ignorance).
grebmar
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Post by grebmar »

Thank you for the solution. After playing with replace styles a bit, I found out how to do this. Now if I could select more than one footnote at once to replace styles...
Shayne
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Post by Shayne »

Ori,

I never scan my documents for bibliographies, but simply copy and paste references. I have a style set up for bibliographic references (both paragraph and character styles) and have no ad hoc formatting. When I copy a formatted reference from BE it appears perfectly, albeit in a 24 pt font (which I use in BE so I can see what I am doing), until I change it to the correct paragraph style in Mellel.

Here I would hope that Mellel would change the font size to match my 12 pt preset style, and that it does. When it does so, however, all the italics are lost.

If I manually change character styles and then paragraph styles, the italics are lost. If I use replace styles and do not set the variations first, that is, do not replace character and then paragraph (and in that order), italics are lost. Why does it have to be so complicated? Why can I not just highlight the text and change paragraph styles (to which I have associated character styles) and maintain the italics, etc.? Is that not the whole point of styles?

Shayne
donb
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Post by donb »

One way to avoid this problem, I think, is to make a paragraph style with which no character style is linked. This way when you apply the paragraph style to your text, it will not affect the character styles and your italics/bold face.

Don
frvs
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Post by frvs »

grebmar wrote:Thank you for the solution. After playing with replace styles a bit, I found out how to do this. Now if I could select more than one footnote at once to replace styles...
Well (assuming you have the same style in every footnote), you can go to a given footnote and check what is the name of the style in it that you wish to replace. Then you go to File > Replace Styles, select that style, and replace it by the style you want to apply to all footnotes. Alternatively, you could also search for all instances of the old footnote style and replace them via Find and Replace, but it seems to me that the former approach is simpler.
Shayne
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Post by Shayne »

donb wrote:One way to avoid this problem, I think, is to make a paragraph style with which no character style is linked. This way when you apply the paragraph style to your text, it will not affect the character styles and your italics/bold face.
Quite true. This might work. But it means that I am then either forced to change the font size on an ad hoc basis (which goes against Mellel’s thinking), or manually apply the character style and once again lose the italics, etc. (and this has now made an extra step). Why do we not have the functionality of the replace styles menu when we manually replace styles?

Shayne
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