Formatted View Footnote

[Nhaps]

Formatted pane under View shows bibliography format, how to switch to footnote instead? That would provide a way to check footnotes without going to Biblio, Formats Manager each time. Thanks--

[Jon]

The formatted view pane shows what would appear in the bibliography, not a formatted citation. You can of course make a complementary format in Bookends in which the formatting instructions you use for citations are instead entered in the bibliography options section. Then you can select that format when entering/editing a reference and you'll see the formatted citation (which in your case will be placed in a footnote) in the lower pane of the library window. When actually scanning a document, you'd use the original format of course.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Nhaps]

Yes, that can be done. But it seems to me that the feature is too important to be left out of BE.

[Jon]

No one has ever asked for this, and I don't see why it is important. You create a format that generates the footnotes one (or use one of ours). It is set-and-forget after that. If you really must see what the footnote is going to look like, open the format and look. Or use the simple workaround I gave you.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Nhaps]

This would be useful when one needs to check many footnotes in a large file, a thesis for example. The purpose of opening the Format window is to adjust wrong footnotes, not for constant monitoring/checking.

[Jon]

You check footnotes in a document by inspecting your document after scanning. The view formatted panes isn't intended for that at all.

Jon
Sonny Software

[ozean]

I can see Nhaps point – one of the reasons people haven’t requested this feature might be that the reworking of Bookends (so that foot-/endnote formats are rolled into the main format) isn’t that long ago.

Of course we can check the correct formatting in the footnotes themselves, but for a long document with many footnotes distributed all over the place it would be easier to do inside Bookends (i.e. by just going through a hit list one by one, moving down the list with the arrow key). I do this infrequently, usually after creating a new format to check if it really works correctly also in edge cases where some fields are empty etc.

However, I also see that this might not be used by many and could cause too much interface clutter…

[Jon]

There are two problems with this that I see (for a feature few would use). One is UI clutter and complexity (and the inevitable frustration of users who mistakenly opt for the citation view and don't know how to get back). The other is more practical -- the citation instructions are set-and-forget, you never need to revisit them. The instances in which you might want to review them are the special cases where you use cited pages or metacharacters to modify the final output. And *those* will not be reflected in the citation example you'd see in Bookends.

For the few who want this feature, though, I've already provided an easy way to achieve it. Simply create a format (My Format Citations) in which you place the citation parameters in the Bibliography Options tab. Now that format will show what the citation would look like when you can select it in the library window lower pane.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Nhaps]

I understand that the feature would not be convenient for a wide number of users. What I do on a daily basis is check whether the abbreviations for my Journal Glossary are displayed right in the Formatted pane. SBL style uses series and journal abbreviations for EVERY reference. So I enabled SBL Footnote just for viewing purpose (although I use another one for scanning), and it shows whether my abbreviations are right. This is very convenient, because other programs like Sente cannot handle Journal Glossaries the way SBL requires.