A couple of refinements to the various Copy options

[rickl]

With 10.5.6, Bookends has realised one of the holy grails of inter-application communication. By selecting a notecard and pressing Command-Option-Shift-L, then switching to DevonThink, Scrivener, Mellel, Nisus, or whatever, and pasting, we obtain the notecard text with a clickable link back to the Bookends reference. (Alternatively, we can still use Command-K to obtain the note plus citation info.) It's difficult to overstate how useful this is, but there are still a couple of problems:

The either/or nature of the link/citation info is unfortunate. The { } citation info allows me in many cases to go ahead and cite the work without going back into Bookends; the link allows me to get fuller information if I need to. I think we need one more variation that copies the notecard text, the citation info, and the link, to cover all the bases. I suspect that this option would be the most used one.

If I select two notecards associated with a reference and use the Command-Option-Shift-L trick, the text of only the first card is copied. It would be great if all the selected notecards could be copied over in one go.


I have one other wishlist item, but suspect this one wouldn't be practical (though one can dream):

It would be nice if OS X Services were available to a selected notecard, so that we could, for example, select a notecard and "Send Notecard and Citation Info to a new DevonThink Note".

[Tony Higgins]

I like all of these suggestions, and I agree--an option to include all three items associated with a note card (the text of the note card, the {citation}, and the hyperlink) would be very useful. Specifically, I would like to be able to select multiple note cards, and then paste in (or send to--via automatic switching, or via the services menu) a given application all three items associated with all of the selected note cards: text, citation, and hyperlink.

[Jon]

The either/or nature of the link/citation info is unfortunate. The { } citation info allows me in many cases to go ahead and cite the work without going back into Bookends; the link allows me to get fuller information if I need to. I think we need one more variation that copies the notecard text, the citation info, and the link, to cover all the bases. I suspect that this option would be the most used one.

Hi,

The copy of the notecard and citation is intended to be used with a word processor document that will be scanned. The copy of the notecard as a hypertext link is intended to be used with a data manager (like DT) so that you can refer back to the reference in Bookends. I understand that you want the citation in the link so that you reference it in DT, but putting all that in the link is confusing (to me) and hard on the UI as well. You can of course do this in two steps now (Copy and note and citation, then copy as link), which is a little extra work but clear and logical.

If I select two notecards associated with a reference and use the Command-Option-Shift-L trick, the text of only the first card is copied. It would be great if all the selected notecards could be copied over in one go.

You man as separate notes and links? The Mac OS URI mechanism doesn't allow that -- only one link per clipboard item (or drag). If you mean you want all the text mashed together under one link, that could be done (but probably in an unattractive manner, such as putting a return between each note, giving one very large underlined link).

Jon
Sonny Software

[Tony Higgins]

You man as separate notes and links? The Mac OS URI mechanism doesn't allow that -- only one link per clipboard item (or drag).

Just for clarity sake, here's what I would like to see: I would like to be able to select multiple note cards from within a given reference, and paste those note cards--complete with text, citation, and hyperlink--within a word processing document. Basically, it would be like using the command-K function, only with a hyperlink to the source reference added after each text/citation. When you say "The Mac OS URI mechanism doesn't allow that -- only one link per clipboard item (or drag)" does that mean that what I have described above is not workable?

For my purposes, being able to send select note cards+citations+hyperlinks to a word processor would allow me the flexibility to organize my flow of thought prior to writing a rough draft. In the writing process, I would then be able to either 1) delete the hyperlinks as I create a rough draft, or 2) create an outline that could be sent to other programs (NoteTaker, Schrivener, Inspiration, DT?) as individual items for further organization/editing.

[Jon]

Hi,

If you selected multiple notecards, Bookends could collect each note and cobble them together, along with one citation and one hypertext link. It could not create a separate notecard + citation + link for each notecard. So you'd get

notecard1
notecard2
notecard3
{Jones, 2008, The theory of everything}

as an underlined link.

Jon
Sonny Software

[aechallu]

The notecards feature is simple and very useful. I wonder what other users and Jon think of these ideas:

1) Variable notecard sizes.

2) I still like to use the original notes field (i.e. the unparsed notes stream), and in these cases I dearly miss the possibility to command-Y the citation with the page number into the wordprocessor. I wonder if it's possible to work on another method to cite the page number when the user is editing notes (regardless of the method: Notes tab in the reference view, notecards, or through the summary pane).

What I envision is that BE pastes as page number the text a user has selected in the notes field. Say I'm working on this Notes field:

PEASANTS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Peasants presented petitions to lift trade barriers (93).
The author rejects the idea of a contradiction between moral and political economy ( 95) and calls for a new understanding of the way peasants appropriated dominant discourses (96).

where the color/underline shows the text the user selected. I'd love to press command-Y and get {Author Title #1234@95} pasted into the word processor. If the user's selection doesn't contain numbers, then BE would discard the selection and paste the citation with no page number. The advantage of this approach is that it accommodates for note flows that are not organized around pages (I could have 95 at any point in the paragraph).

Anyway, I hope this makes any sense at all!

Many thanks in advance for listening

[rickl]

If you selected multiple notecards, Bookends could collect each note and cobble them together, along with one citation and one hypertext link. It could not create a separate notecard + citation + link for each notecard. So you'd get

notecard1
notecard2
notecard3
{Jones, 2008, The theory of everything}

as an underlined link.

This strikes me as being ideal. I don't see much point in multiple identical links, and making links fine-grained enough to point to specific notes seems overkill.

[rickl]

The notecards feature is simple and very useful. I wonder what other users and Jon think of these ideas:
1) Variable notecard sizes.

Interesting. Let's imagine we're back in time at a point just before notecards were introduced. Jon says "Do you want fixed size or variable size?" How would we answer?

I imagine that my first reaction would be variable so that I can see the full text of each note. (Is that your reason for this suggestion?) But I can imagine Jon pointing out that a long note would take all the available space and I'd be unable to see my other notes or even how many notes I have, which would probably flip me to wanting fixed-size notecards. Do you perhaps envisage notecards freely resizable by the user? Or dynamically resized by the software? Right now, I can't say it's something that I want, but please tell us more!

[Jon]

But I can imagine Jon pointing out that a long note would take all the available space and I'd be unable to see my other notes or even how many notes I have, which would probably flip me to wanting fixed-size notecards.

Yes, that's exactly what I would say. :-)

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

I'd love to press command-Y and get {Author Title #1234@95} pasted into the word processor. If the user's selection doesn't contain numbers, then BE would discard the selection and paste the citation with no page number. The advantage of this approach is that it accommodates for note flows that are not organized around pages (I could have 95 at any point in the paragraph).

I'm not sure this is a generally useful solution (it requires that the page number or range already be entered with your reference). But what about something like this? Say you press Control-Command-Y and a small dialog comes up with a text field. Whatever you enter in that field is added to the temp citation preceded by the @? If nothing is entered, nothing is added to the temp citation. If multiple references are selected, the dialog won't appear (you wouldn't want to enter the same cited pages for different references).

Would this be useful?

Jon
Sonny Software

[nicka]

Yes. I think so, at least, because it would be faster and smoother than what is needed now: having to move to the right position in the reference, enter an @-sign, then get out of the reference text to continue typing.

[rickl]

I'm already a wee bit confused, even though I started off this discussion: am I right in thinking that this latest is an additional option rather than replacing one of the existing ones? What would be the complete list of Copy Citation-type commands and their keyboard equivalents?

[Jon]

I'm suggesting that Control-Command-Y would bring up a dialog box asking for the cited pages.

Jon
Sonny Software

[rickl]

Generally, I make notes related to specific pages and the page reference is contained within the note. But I can see that the new proposed option would give us much greater flexibility. It sounds good to me.

[aechallu]

Jon wrote: I'm not sure this is a generally useful solution (it requires that the page number or range already be entered with your reference

I don't understand the parenthesis. By definition any note that the user needs to cite contains a page number or a page range. (Otherwise the note-taker is not interested in citing a specific page number from this note in BE).

Jon wrote: But what about something like this? Say you press Control-Command-Y and a small dialog comes up with a text field. Whatever you enter in that field is added to the temp citation preceded by the @? If nothing is entered, nothing is added to the temp citation. If multiple references are selected, the dialog won't appear (you wouldn't want to enter the same cited pages for different references).

Would this be useful?

I agree that using ctrl-command-Y is better; otherwise command-Y would have two behaviors.

But I believe that highlighting page numbers/ranges in a note field works better than using a dialog box. For two reasons:
1) At least from my experience dialogs are annoying and I guess there's a chance that the dialog will cover precisely the section of the window that contains the info I'm looking for
2) Because in my approach the user would be actively selecting a text fragment in a note field and pressing a specialized keystroke. In my opinion this minimizes the likelihood of a misunderstanding of the function. Even if the user presses the keystroke by mistake, the consequences are minimal--the user can easily remove the post@ part of the citation. We're not talking about a deleted reference.

The key is that to work the user has to highlight text in a note for this command to work (if there's no selection ctrl-command-y acts as command-y). Even because the user is using a specialized command (ctrl-command-y) you could skip the evaluation of the text selected by the user and simply paste after @ whatever text the user selected. I'd prefer, though, that BE make a simple evaluation of the selection to make sure that the string starts or ends with a number (to reduce the possibilities of a user mistake).

On variable note sizes I waive the white flag and embrace the "note tweets".

Thanks!