Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

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iljajj
Posts: 28
Joined: Mon Jul 26, 2010 11:12 am

Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

Post by iljajj »

Hi all,

I didn't find a recent thread on this, so I'm posting this as a new question. My publisher wants me to deliver my manuscript using Chicago 16th short titles. The problem is that I never entered short titles in Bookends and if at all possible, I'd like to avoid the chore of having to enter 500+ titles manually. It would already be a great help if I could find a way to cut titles at the period or colon, but sofar I'm not seeing a way to do so. Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance, Ilja
Jon
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Re: Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

Post by Jon »

That's not what a shortened title is (very few titles contain colons or are two sentences separated by a period). A shortened title retains a subset of the relevant info from the full title. Examples here

https://research.wou.edu/c.php?g=551307&p=3785493

This requires intelligent curating, something Bookends can't do for you.

Frankly, I've never heard of a journal that requires short titles for all citations, just for a citation that is cited more than once (from the second time on). Check with your editor. If that's the case here, you only need to create short titles for those situations.

Jon
Sonny Software

P.S. Here's an old thread on this topic

viewtopic.php?t=261
mclearc
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Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 2:10 am

Re: Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

Post by mclearc »

I rename all my pdfs using BibTeX cite key and title. I would vastly prefer titles to be shortened to whatever appears before a colon or hyphen (I work in philosophy and titles of the form X:Y or X-Y are *very* common). Right now I have to manually put the shorter title into the "Short title" section so that Bookends will rename the pdf appropriately. But I often forget. It would be great if Bookends could do this automatically (Zotero, for example, has an option to automatically rename only with whatever appears before a colon, etc). Judging by the requests in the forum this doesn't seem like a totally niche request.
Jon
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Re: Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

Post by Jon »

There is already a shortcut for this. It requires user intervention, but it gives you complete control over the short title and works regardless of whether the title has a particular punctuation mark or not.

Select the text in the Title field that you want as the short title and then right-click. Select "Put Selected Text In Short Title Field".

Jon
Sonny Software
aurelio
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Re: Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

Post by aurelio »

I completely agree that the decision on the form of a short title cannot be mechanical and as such requires a manual operation. However, wouldn't it be possible to create a keyboard shortcut for the "Put Selected Text In Short Title Field" command? I very often enter the titles of works by hand, and it would definitely be simpler if I could, without taking my hands off the keyboard, deal with the title together with the shortened title.
Jon
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Re: Auto-shorten titles to short titles?

Post by Jon »

We have the right-click mentioned above. Adding yet another obscure keyboard shortcut to move the entire contents to the short title field where it would have to be edited doesn't seem like an improvement to me. If that's what you want you can use the well documented shortcuts for Copy and Paste.

Jon
Sonny Software
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