Sonny Software

My bibliography searches don't pick up all instances of an author whose name is O'Mahony. Perhaps there is a setting somewhere affecting the treatment of apostrophes? Or some other fixable problem?

I just did a test with a fake entry, also involving an apostrophe. Same problem.

How are you searching?

Jon
Sonny Software

Different ways. Just now, to assure that I was telling the truth, I looked at the list of all items in the library and searched for O'Mahony. Up popped two records, in both of which I was first author and O'Mahony was the second author. Many items did NOT show up, including many in which she is a co-editor. I even moused over the search box and set it for and all fields. Nothing changed.

So you're doing a live search.

The search is indexed, apostrophes are ignored.

Did you Rebuild the library? Or Reindex?

Jon
Sonny Software

Yes, I just now rebuilt. Same result.

Please send me your library.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon cleared up the problem. He pointed out that Mac OS has a system preferences setting, under Keyboard/Text, which has a toggle for "Use smart quotes and dashes." The default is "on." This means that when I entered a new in Bookends for O'Mahony, it went in with a curly, smart, non-straight apostrophe. That was not showing up in a search. After changing the setting in System Preferences and restarting, I changed all my references with O'*** in the data base. Initially, I used Global Change, but Jon pointed out that Term Lists can be used a bit more efficiently.

A fairly exotic problem, but it's solved. Whew.