Copy Note And Citation renders only Plain Text

[Philologist]

In the User Guide, p. 87f., we can read:

"Notecards can display styled text (italics, bold, underline, and color), which is useful for organizing and highlighting your thoughts." and "To insert the notecard contents followed by the temporary citation, use Edit -> Copy Note And Citation (Command-K)".

Now, I would expect the text being inserted as formatted text (into Nisus Writer Pro ), if the note text is formatted, but it is indeed only inserted as Plain Text.

Could this be fixed?

More details:

1. Dragging and dropping notecards with the Option key held down into a NWP document also just copies the notes and the citations as Plain Text.

2. However, Edit -> Copy (Command-C) and then paste with Command-V into NWP will retain all formatting.

I tried this also with Pages v.5.5.3, and I got the same result.

[Jon]

I've forgotten exactly how this was to work to be frank, but since citations should be in plain text this is by design. There is nothing to fix (whether in red or not).

Copy Notecard -> styled text
Copy Citation -> plain text
Copy Notecard and Citation -> plain text.

If you must have your notes a styled text, do this in two steps.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Philologist]

I've forgotten exactly how this was to work to be frank, but since citations should be in plain text this is by design.

Let me clarify. I'm talking about quotations in Notecards here.

In scholarly papers quotations must correspond exactly to the original source. If passages in the original source are written in bold and italics, for example, then this must be meticulously followed when quoting.

Now here is the problem. Let's assume I'm writing about European history and want to describe the historical situation at the beginning of the 18th century. I want to quote a passage from a book which describes the situation. For this purpose I have stored a quotation as a Notecard, given it a header, assigned a tag and entered the page number. (See screenshot)

1.png (55.32 KiB) Viewed 9079 times

Now, the “Copy Notecard and Citation” seems to be the perfect command for getting the quotation and the citation marker into NWP. But alas, what actually happens is that the text is pasted as Plain Text, which of course makes the whole quotation useless.

2.png (48.5 KiB) Viewed 9079 times

This needs to be changed, unless the citation marker and the notecard content are so closely knit together that retaining the original formatting after pasting is technically impossible.

"Copy Notecard -> styled text"
If you must have your notes a styled text, do this in two steps.

This method requires not two, but 4 (four!) steps:
1. Copy Notecard
2. Paste Notecard into NWP

3.png (52.46 KiB) Viewed 9079 times

3. As can be seen on the screenshot, the header (= Whig Policy), the tag (= English history), and the page number (= @3) all need now to be manually removed from the document by the user.

4. And since the citation marker was not included in the "Copy Notecard"-step, it has to be added now as an extra step.

[Jon]

I understand. But it is still be design, since the citation must be in plain text.

I'll think about it.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

I've played around with implementing this. There are problems. The more serious is that once we include styled text, the font and size may not agree with what's in the word processor (because that setting is coming from Bookends). Neither the default reference values nor the default bibliography values may match what you're using in the body of the word processor text. So you'll have to post-process those styles. The other is that it can't work with Mellel. Frankly, it seems you're exchanging one set of problems for another. Anyone else think this is worth it?

Jon
Sonny Software

[Philologist]

once we include styled text, the font and size may not agree with what's in the word processor (because that setting is coming from Bookends)

That shouldn't be a problem, because a professional writer uses a *paragraph* style for lengthily quotations, and a paragraph style determines the font, size, indentation and space(s) before and after a paragraph.

The important attributes in a quotation are Font Face (bold, underline and italic), and they are always left unchanged when you apply a paragraph style to text (in NWP), no matter what kind of paragraph style you are using.

Paragraph styles.png (87.29 KiB) Viewed 9061 times

Neither the default reference values nor the default bibliography values may match what you're using in the body of the word processor text. So you'll have to post-process those styles

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "default bibliography values". Again, the final bibliography in the document will have its own paragraph style too; thus it has a unified look, with hanging indent and the right space between the paragraphs (i.e. in the bibliography).

it can't work with Mellel

I'll take a look at that.

[martinjp]

Jon, for what it's worth, I too have been concerned that when copying a quotation into a notecard, formatting such as italics is lost. Since my goal is to use the quotation in a manuscript, I need to be sure the formatting is correct.

Martin

[Jon]

The OP is not asking about copying text into a notecard. He's talking about using the right-click option "Copy Notecard and Citation" ("Copy Notecard" already retains styled text).

Bookends should retain character styles when copying text into a notecard. Do you not find this to be the case? If not, how are you actually entering the text in the notecard?

Jon
Sonny Software

[martinjp]

Gadzooks, your right! I was assimilating what I read to my own experience. I'm simply using Make Bookends Notecard from Selection. Here's one example:

be tied to the implications of casual sex for teenage well-being.
Implications of Casual Sex
Adolescent casual sex is important to study because of the potential negative implications of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies. These two possible outcomes are directly related to contraceptive use

In the original pdf, the heading "Implications of Causal Sex" is in italics. In the notecard it is not.

Here's a second example:

Constructing Learning Environments for Complex Social Skills
Author(s): Alex Kass, Robin Burke, Eli Blevis, Mary Williamson
Source: The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 4, Goal-Based Scenarios (1993 - 1994), pp. 387-427

In the pdf, the journal title is in italics. In the notecard it is not.

[Jon]

Bookends has no clue as to the text styles in a selection -- the PDF Kit functions don't report that. But if you copied styled text to the clipboard and pasted into a new notecard, the styles would be retained. To see if the clipboard contains styles, paste into TextEdit. If styles are pasted in there, then they'll be pasted into Bookends.

Jon
Sonny Software

[martinjp]

Jon, before posting I copied into Word, to test just what you're describing. I've just now pasted into TextEdit. In neither case do the italics show up.

Martin

[Jon]

In that case the clipboard doesn't contain the styled text information. I tried this with a PDF here and both Preview and Bookends copy the styled text just fine. So I'm guessing that the OS APIs that do that copy can't see the styles in your example. If you have further questions, please follow up off-forum with tech support.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

In the next update, I've implemented the original requested feature and one other that deals with notecards.

1. Copy Notecard now ignores any header, cited page, or tags and places the styled text in the clipboard.
2. Copy Notecard With Citation will do the same (note that the text will now be styled) and switch to a linked word processor and paste. The switch and paste won't happen if Mellel is linked, because Mellel would treat the entire clipboard as a citation, not realizing that it is a combination of text and citation. In this case, you could do this in two steps -- first Copy Notecard, then Copy Citation.

Jon
Sonny Software