Sonny Software

About once a year I run into really irritating scan problems. Eventually, I have always found the problems. However, I wonder how others debug efficiently.

Naturally, I tried chapter-by-chapter scanning. However, to my surprise toay, that worked even though scanning the whole did not.

The error message is


I have also tried searching for the pipe sign |, which I use rather than {, and then eyeballing each citation to see if something is obviously wrong. I have spotted and fixed errors, but not the source of the problem. Further, that approach is eye-glazing when there are scores of references.

Perhaps others have more clever ways of debugging?

It looks like Bookends is finding the word "Western" is some raw RTF code (see the text below the list -- that's the "sentence" that includes the faux citation. So there's something about your particular document that is confusing to Bookends. This could be tricky to track down unless you can make an educated guess as to what that might be. You could look in the raw RTF of your file, but since it looks like there is binary mixed in with the characters I think this would be hard to search for.

Jon
Sonny Software

To make things more confusing, when I came into the office today, using the same files (via Dropbox) but my laptop rather than my iMac at home, the file scanned readily except that the bibliography appearing in Seravek ExtraLight, rather than Times Roman. I have no idea where Seravek ExtraLighgt came from, since I've never consciously used it for anything, nor even heard of it.

I was a bit shocked that the scan otherwise worked. Thus, I tried to reproduce the scan. This time it failed--although differently than yesterday. As the blur when by while scanning was proceeding, I noticed that at least one entry had "western" in it and some of the rtf stuff. At the end of the scan, I got a message about unmatched citations. I said yes (i.e., saying to continue despite the glitches). The scan then completed and bibliography appeared in Times Roman, as intended. Something is presumably still fouled up, but not visibly.

Aside from the fact that I use Dropbox for the files I'm working on, I don't know of anything peculiar to mention about my setup, configurations, etc.

I don't know what's going on, just that there something in the RTF of your document that is fooling Bookends. As you saw, you can continue. You may not see this issue again on the same document, since Bookends will replace the pipes in the erroneous citation with parentheses. Just make sure to check your document to ensure that this doesn't cause some unexpected formatting problem in the Word document.

Jon
Sonny Software