A couple of refinements to the various Copy options

[nicka]

Just to offer a different perspective from Aechallu, although I'm not disagreeing:

The Command-Control-y shortcut as proposed would be useful to anyone who needs to enter citations with page numbers, including people (like me) who don't make notes in Bookends, whereas what Aechallu is suggesting is something different and rather specialised for people who both keep notes in Bookends and mark them up with page numbers.

[Jon]

There are a limited number of keystroke combinations, and it is just confusing to have many variations on "Command-Y". The advantage of a dialog box (which is easy to dismiss with a Return or Enter, with the textbox empty) is that it works in all situations. Perhaps the dialog could be initially populated with the selection. Then if you have the page range selected, you'd hit Control-Command-Y and Return. If no pages are selected, you'd hit Control-Command-Y, type in the pages, the hit Return (or press OK). Another possibility would be to switch and paste if there is a selection, but put up a dialog box if there isn't. But I think the the same keystroke combination should bring up a dialog every time, populated if possible with the selection.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

I've implemented this dual approach: a dialog box for cited pages that is automatically populated by the selected text (if any), and is invoked by holding down the Control key when performing a copy citation. It will be included in the next update.

Jon
Sonny Software

[aechallu]

The dual approach works perfectly with me. One easy enter and that's it. Thanks not only for listening but also for implementing

You may even want to consider extending the approach to include other popular modifications and addenda to citations. For example:

(1) Page reference: ____ <--- filled with selection.
(2) Add before citation: ______ <--- empty by default
(3) Hide author checkbox <--- empty by default

Say I had selected 123 in the note field. I press ctrl-command-y. The dialog will come up with (1)= "123" . I fill (2)= "See", and (3) is unchecked.
Then BE would paste:

{See\Author #98765@123}

Say I just pressed enter and I'd get {Author #98765@123}

You could add a fourth option, a pop-down list with the word processor you want the citation to go to (to override just in this instance the user selection through the Link command) to take care of one user's comment that it'd be useful to be able to switch on the fly.

The good thing is that by just pressing Enter I get what I want , but the other options may be useful for other users as well.

[Jon]

Hm, interesting idea. How do others feel about extending Control-Command-Y? I don't see a downside...

Jon
Sonny Software

[ozean]

Sounds neat.

[rickl]

I haven't thought it through fully, but like Jon I can't see a downside.

Well, the small downside is that most people won't be aware of the options, and the fact that they might actually "need" some of them but aren't aware of that need. I think this is another of those cases where you really need a video tutorial. As well as helping existing users, this kind of thing is (I imagine) a good advert for Bookends, the message being that a reference manager doesn't have to be a boring thing that just helps you get the commas, periods, and parentheses right in a bibliography but can also be a tool to help you keep track of your own thoughts and also works well with all your other favorite applications.

Yes, I know video tutorials take a long time to make. Are you interested in user-contributed tutorials? Is anybody here good at making them? (I have Screenflow, but my attempts so far haven't been too impressive.)

[Jon]

Hi,

I have been remiss about making more tutorials -- too busy adding the features you are asking for!

You think a tutorial on ways to add temp citations to the word processor would be useful?

I'd be happy to consider any user-generated tutorials. It's a fair amount of work to make a decent one, though (you need a script, and it requires post-processing). But if you have any you or anyone else thinks is suitable, I'd be very happy to see them.

Jon
Sonny Software

[aechallu]

I personally don't use video tutorials. But I think that reworking the menus could facilitate the discovery of the feature. By menus I mean Edit, the gear thingy and the contextual menu, all the ones that allow to copy citations.

My proposal is to group the several "Copy" commands (Copy citation, formatted, hyperlink) under a submenu. I assume that the submenu will still tip the user with the shortcut as it is in the present case. I would call the submenu Cite, or Copy & Cite.

If submenus are hideous then... why not have "Cite" as a top-level menu? It could replace Font, a lovely relic of the OS 9 era

[rickl]

I have been remiss about making more tutorials -- too busy adding the features you are asking for!

Yes, I'm all too aware that asking for features isn't helping you get the tutorials out. I would suggest that the topic not be restricted to word-processors, rather the general point about working with other applications. The fact that Bookends can create links that point back to specific references is useful in many ways. A look around the forum suggests that DevonThink is the most popular application for people to use alongside Bookends; maybe that would be a nice thing to show, too.

Another related idea, which might fill in any eventual gaps and serve as help for newer users until the video tutorials are done: How about compiling a list of Tips from Bookends Users or something of the sort, perhaps to put as a sticky post in the forums, or elsewhere on the site? There don't seem to be that many active forum people these days, so it might take some time to get a good collection together, but I'd imagine such a list might fill some of the gaps between the manual and the dispersed nature of the info on the forum. Just a thought....

My proposal is to group the several "Copy" commands (Copy citation, formatted, hyperlink) under a submenu.

That's interesting. I'd be grateful if people could take a look at a related proposal on another thread:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2410

[rickl]

On variable note sizes I waive the white flag

Actually, I've only just realised why this might be quite important to some people. (Apologies for missing the point earlier.) While I still think that allowing the notecards to grow too big is a bad idea, for reasons mentioned earlier in the thread, if you have a lot of small notecards the present arrangement is rather space-wasting. This isn't a particularly big deal for me, and I don't think it's as important as the other issues in the thread, but I can see that it might be desirable to allow notecards to be much smaller when the amount of content warrants it, perhaps in some future version.

In fact, if the notecards could have some kind of label or title which would make them easily identifiable, the default size could safely be made smaller and this would help people who prefer to work with lots of short notes. Perhaps getting a bit fanciful here, but, since screens tend to be pretty wide these days, how about an option for notecards arranged in two columns?

[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.

Hi Jon,

Now that 10.6 is out, I've tried all (I think) of the various Copy options when notecards are selected and I'm impressed with the flexibility. But the one thing I haven't been able to find is the one described above (i.e. I can get a link or a citation but not both). Did you decide not to implement this one because of all the proliferation of options, or have I just overlooked how to do it?

[Jon]

Yes, I thought that was getting kind of complicated/confusing, so I've put it aside for now. If people really want it, we can revisit the issue.

Jon
Sonny Software

[rickl]

That was actually the thing I most wanted and my motivation for starting the thread. Tony Higgins seconded my suggestion. But I've no idea how many others also are interested. The benefits of the new options beyond what I originally imagined are great, and it won't kill us to use two operations when we need both link and citation, but a one-step operation would certainly be more efficient if there's a not too complicated way of implementing it.