Maximum size of "notes" field?

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macula
Posts: 167
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:14 pm

Maximum size of "notes" field?

Post by macula »

Hi,

I have a habit of keeping rather long rich-text notes in the 'notes' field of every item in my bibliography. Today I noticed that some of the longest such fields were truncated, with significant portions of of text missing. Thankfully, I still have the Endnote database from which I imported those items into Bookends, so I am able to recover the missing text. This raises a crucial question, though: Does Bookend impose an upper limit to the 'notes' field?

To give an example, a notes field originally 47,750 characters long (in Endnote) has been truncated to 31,168 characters.
The last 47,750-31,168=16,582 characters have been truncated by Bookends, or so it seems to me.

Is there indeed a maximum notes length, or is this just an accident not to worry about?

Thank you.
macula
Posts: 167
Joined: Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:14 pm

Re: Maximum size of "notes" field?

Post by macula »

In response to my own question, I just noticed that the truncation only occurs in the "preview" pane. Double clicking on the item and opening its own window reveals the text in its entirety.

May I kindly ask that the bug be ironed out in the future? I have created a style which appends the notes after the bibliographic information, so that I can read my notes in the preview pane (the "notes stream" is fine but I don't like reading my notes in column format; the alternative solution, which is to double-click on the item and then on the notes button of its window, is too slow for quick browsing).

Thank you.
Jon
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Re: Maximum size of "notes" field?

Post by Jon »

As I recall, there is a 32K limit per any given field that Bookends will output in a format (far more then you ever need for bibliographies or citations). That's what I get when I try as well, so I don't know why you appear limited to 16K. In any case, if you have more characters in the notes field and want to see them all without opening the reference, use the Concise View pane (on the right) with the standard view. You can widen the Concise View pane so that it isn't so "columnar".

Jon
Sonny Software
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