Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

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MathiasG
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by MathiasG »

Thanks David! I'll give it a try!
Icelander
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by Icelander »

DavidH wrote: Fri Apr 16, 2021 7:38 pm Boris’s old workaround should still work as well.
I think it's time we make it clear what we are actually talking about. Generally speaking, endnotes can be found in two places: at the end of a document or at the end of chapters. Mellel can position endnotes at the end of a document, but not at the end of a chapter. Nisus can do both.

Boris was obviously talking about placing endnotes at the end of chapters (= sections) and he made the wrong assumption that he can achieve this by the following setting:

Note Stream: Endnote
Position: Below text
Numbering: Restart every section


"Below text" simply means that if we enter a section break in the middle of a page, and—for the sake of argument—call the first document part "Section A" and the second part "Section B", then all endnotes on that page (as far as they belong to Section A) will be put in the middle of the page, i.e. below the text in Section A. All the other endnotes on the previous pages will be placed at the BOTTOM of the pages, thus making them look pretty much like footnotes.
Using Insert > Note > Edit note attributes, you can set endnotes to print at each section break
Are you referring to the option "Below text" here? If we share the same presupposition that endnotes are multiple single notes presented and viewed by the reader as *one* group, then this is bound to fail, as I just demonstrated.
Then if you write your document so that there’s just one section break (or just one page range break), at the very end of your main text, endnotes should be printed together at the end of your main text
Not if you choose the "Below text" option, as I have already made clear.
Last edited by Icelander on Sat Apr 17, 2021 8:32 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Icelander
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by Icelander »

MathiasG wrote: Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:18 pm I'm a bit disappointed […] this kind of thing is a no go for a bigger project with Mellel.
The only method which seems to work reasonably well is the following:

Note Stream: Endnote
Position: End of document
Numbering: Continuous
Separator: No line
(in case we later want to precede the notes with a title, such as "Endnotes")

When the document is scanned

1. A section break and a bibliography are automatically placed after the document text, before the endnotes

2. Now, enter a section break manually after the bibliography (recommended in the Mellel Guide, p. 139, but I don't see any compelling reason for doing that, it doesn't change anything)

3. Only when the last editing has been done and you are sure there will be no more changes, cut the bibliography and position it where you want it to be. Unfortunately the nice long vertical gray line along the left margin disappears.

4. If you want the bibliography to start on a new page, you'll have to hit the Return key until the first reference appears on a new page. Trying to insert a page break won't help because we are in a Mellel endnotes-area where page breaks are not producing any significant or desired effect. Auto-titles can also not be used here (they are grayed out.)
Last edited by Icelander on Sun Apr 18, 2021 2:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Icelander
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by Icelander »

MathiasG wrote: Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:18 pm I won't take the risk of multiplying workarounds in a 100k words book.
Just curious, why do the notes have to be endnotes, grouped at the end of the document? Why not use footnotes? They are much more reader-friendly.
If it's required by the publishing company, what are their supporting arguments for endnotes then?
MathiasG
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by MathiasG »

Yes, but for the kind of history I'm writing it's quite frequent to have endnotes. I have seen that I could "move" the biblio when it's compiled but I don't want to take chances when I'm doing the final edits (in addition to refresh manually the ToC, etc.)
I'm quite happy with other aspects of Mellel (consistent and fine-grained styling), and I think having two sets of "anchors", one for the biblio, and one for the endnotes, would be a great "plus" for academics. I have no idea about the kind of development it involves.
In most books, endnote and references, in that order, are chapters, have a title, do appear in the TOC.
DavidH
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by DavidH »

Thanks to Icelander for filling in these important details.
MathiasG
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by MathiasG »

Thanks to both of you, that was really precious. I have my answers, but I just take a few more seconds to document the problem, for the record, in case other or future users face the same.
In France, and this might be true for other countries, both for published books and for dissertations (which is another market for Mellel), you would typically have the following structure
  • Frontmatter
    Introduction (paginated as the body, or, rarely, with roman numbers)
    Body (Chapters, sections)
    Endnotes (if any)
    Bibliography
    Index
    Table of contents
All the sections, including endnotes and biblio, must appear in the TOC.
Treating endnotes, biblio, index and Toc as proper sections (or chapters), with their headers, their titles, etc., would be highly relevant in terms of structure and would give more versatility to the app. It would seem consistent with the general philosophy.
As such, if I'm right, I have a workaround for the endnotes, but I'll still face the other problems. This can be settled with cut and paste (which is not trivial, since the biblio will become a portion of text and cannot be refreshed anymore), but I might have pagination issues when I move that, and the ToC will have to be edited manually (at least for the sections that will not appear). And it adds some stress to the final stages.
Icelander
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by Icelander »

Found another thread about the same issue, BE biblio placement, written by mkenney, and an answer by one of the Redlers.

The answer reads like this:
"I think you should expect positive developments here soon".

This was 2006, 14 years ago.
Makes me want to cry…

<viewtopic.php?f=2&t=731&p=4337&hilit=endnotes#p4337>
Last edited by Icelander on Mon Apr 19, 2021 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MathiasG
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2020 12:52 pm

Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by MathiasG »

Interesting. Nisus Pro can do that very easily (there's an option in the menu).
15 years is a long stretch though...
One of the supposed merits of Mellel (which has plenty) is to be able to deal better with long form documents, and I'm quite ready to believe that, I really appreciate some other aspects of the app, but I have trouble thinking that one can really write and typeset an academic book with it, because of these related problems. Having to cut and paste things at the end of a long period of writing cannot be a viable solution.
Icelander
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by Icelander »

MathiasG wrote: Sun Apr 18, 2021 10:29 am
  • Frontmatter
    Introduction (paginated as the body, or, rarely, with roman numbers)
    Body (Chapters, sections)
    Endnotes (if any)
    Bibliography
    Index
    Table of contents
Thanks for taking the time to write down for us the French structure. I didn't know that la table des matières always needs to be put at the end in French books and dissertations. I checked the French books in my private library, and yes, they indeed all have the TOC at the end. :–)

This creates additional problems in Mellel when using endnotes. — Because the Index and the TOC come after the endnotes, they both fall into the black pit, the endnotes-area, or the death-zone, as I like to call it, in which no Auto-titles and no breaks can be added. This means that the endnotes, the bibliography, and the Index do not show up in the TOC.

The Index itself can not be directly inserted into the death-zone via the Insert menu > Index > Insert Index. The menu command "Insert Index" is grayed out, so you must insert the Index somewhere in to the body and then cut and paste it to the right end position after the bibliography.

Just for the record, within "an English-language book, the table of contents usually appears after the title page, copyright notices, and, in technical journals, the abstract; and before any lists of tables or figures, the foreword, and the preface." (Wikipedia)
This is usually also the case in German and Italian (?) books. French books in German translation often have the TOC at the end, following the French convention. The Nordic languages place the TOC at the beginning, just like in English.

In Nisus the endnote-area is not a death-zone. You can add Auto-titles (in Nisus lingo: headings with TOC levels) to the endnotes, the bibliography and the index. So that all will show up correctly in the TOC.
Last edited by Icelander on Fri Dec 24, 2021 7:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MathiasG
Got the styles thing figured out
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Re: Bibliography is inserted before endnotes?

Post by MathiasG »

Well, you are exactly right, the problem seems to lie with the dead zone.
As far as I can see, the market for Mellel is not primarily, even if they might be the majority of extant users:
-- authors who just have to submit a paper, since the journal will rewrap absolutely everything, and the first thing they will do is to remove all formatting.
-- People writing novels, for a publisher. In general they do prefer a very basic rtf or doc file. Writing that, I know that they might be numerous among Mellel users though.
-- anyone writing short form for the web, since Ulysses, for example, will do that perfectly, using Mellel is some kind of overkill
Remaining users are those (a) who want to have control over the typesetting of the whole manuscript, (b) dealing with complex and long documents, ( c) who want to produce camera ready pdfs, whether it is for a dissertation, a book, a scholarly edition. They also, certainly, use Mellel for their writing, not only for typesetting, because if you just want to typeset, using Lyx/LaTeX will bring more powerful resources (index, endnotes, etc, where you want them to be; running headers for the notes zone, etc.)
In all these cases, a-b-c, you need fine-grained control on the backmatter, and endnotes cannot be a dead zone, without even the possibility of prefixing that with a title and, if needed, a paragraph.
I do prefer Mellel over Nisus Pro for the stability of formatting, the overall control of ligatures and other nice aspects, such as the perfect integration with Bookends, but (a) Nisus handles perfectly local needs for typography, non-breaking spaces before double punctuations, and other details, (b) is more flexible for what will be important in the final stages of my MS.
So, even if us French have our peculiarities, as I must confess, these needs are certainly shared by a wider public, as soon as they need to use endnotes at all.
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