Problems with flat ODT Scanned Bibliographies

[iandol]

I have several bugs when I try to format flat ODT files, which I generate using Scrivener > multimarkdown > FODT and then work on in LibreOffice 4.3.1.2:

• MINOR: the suggested name of e.g. myname.fodt for the new document is myname.fodt.formatted -- it should be myname.formatted.fodt
• MAJOR: I get a General Error. General input/output error. when trying to load the resultant document, loading fails!
• MAJOR: Lots of mangled output looking in the raw text, mostly text in citation fall out of brackets

Examples of mangled output (notice brackets fail to surround text in italic which they should:

Although evolution has honed this design to be efficient as possible there are still many inherent weaknesses {\most notably, resolution with an absolute physical upper limit of 1°, \Goldsmith, 1990, #38455}. >>>
Although evolution has honed this design to be efficient as possible there are still many inherent weaknesses most notably, resolution with an absolute physical upper limit of 1°, (Goldsmith, 1990)

Bookend 12.2.3 running on Yosemite Public Beta 3 -- I can send you a sample input and output FODT privately to see if you can understand why they become unloadable, I used a text diff to look at the differeneces and can't see anything major, though my latex equations get very mangled too...

[Jon]

I not sure how a flat .odt file might be handled different from a normal one. Have you tried just saving a file normally from LibreOffice and scanning that?

Jon
Sonny Software

[iandol]

Hi, thanks Jon; indeed ODT seems to not have any of the issues I reported for FODT files. I prefer FODT as I can more easily tweaks figures and edit the XML if need be (I will therefore Save As the resultant formatted file to FODT), but this is an acceptable workaround for the moment.

What is the technical reason all my final bibliography reference formatting (i.e. I have my journal titles in bold, and italic et al. in replaced citations) gets lost for ODT but not RTF (I have Styled Text ON in the prefs)?

Finally (sorry for the hotpot reply!), what is the best way for me to guard my latex equations (which also contain {}) from getting mangled? Would {\ ... \} do the trick?

Thanks for great software (I finally made the leap from Endnote)!

[Jon]

I just tested scanning in both LIbreOffice and Open Office and formatting (bold, italic) was preserved in both citations and the bibliography of an .odt file. You say that this works for you when scanning RTF but not .odt (you've tested that)?

As for the Latex issue, you can select a citation delimiter other than { } in preferences: [ ]. ~ ~, or | |.

Jon
Sonny Software

[iandol]

I had actually tested this previous to switching over to using a converted ODT to generate the file for Bookends to Scan, testing with the ODT I can see now that the formatting is present, so that was another problem solved.

I'll probably just remove my Latex equations and replace them as I prefer using {} for temporary citations. I would like some way allow some kind of command like:

{§leave {this} text alone} ==> leave {this} text alone

so I can fence some text that may wrongly trigger Bookends into trying to create citations...

[iandol]

I'm still missing[1] a good way to escape text to stop Bookends trying to cite. I'd be happy with any exclusion system, it doesn't need to be a modified {} syntax; <!-- --> for example...

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[1] having to jiggle equations and other text that use { } in and out of documents isn't terrible, but it isn't optimal workflow either...