Preference Issues

A place for users to ask each other questions, make suggestions, and discuss Bookends.
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laup
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2009 6:28 pm

Preference Issues

Post by laup »

Perhaps others have solved this problem trivially, but:

Maintaining Bookends' consistency between two machines is tricky because one has to remember to make both the stuff in Applications Support and Preferences consistent. The typical problem with the former is having the same name for old and improved formats. Problems with preferences are different. Preferences is where you specify

Word Processor (I shift between Mellel and Word)
Default fonts for bibliographies (I shift between Times Roman and Bookman; I also have to shift font sizes depending on publication) [Yes, I
know that there are options for using the word processor's style, but that can be a bit of a hassle]
Reference Types (user-defined items can get confused)
Field Labels (again, user-defined labels can be inconsistent).
The "Don't change case" list in Scan & Bib (an important list that needs to be synchronized)
The Bibliography sort list (not as big a problem)

The default font is also in preferences; that

This is without using many of Bookends' fancier features.
Preferences also get messed up when reinstalling Bookends for some reason--unless one remembers to save the old preferences (but those, of course, might be corrupted)

DESIRES (Unless there is an easy workaround for the brainless or unless I just misunderstand):

Desire: have such Preferences information in one's personal Application Support folder, as a kind of "global" format? It would then be easier to synchronize (one folder to worry about) and it would be rare to "lose" a good preferences file.

Desire: be able to have a few alternative preference files to make it easy to switch among them for, e.g., manuscripts that must be in Word versus those that need not be, and publications where different conventions are used with respect to stuff like ignoring or not ignoring items like "von" in von Creveld.
Jon
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Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
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Re: Preference Issues

Post by Jon »

Hi,

Preferences shouldn't change at all when updating Bookends (except that new preference options might appear). If they are for you, you should send your preferences file to me and I'll see if it's OK.

Most preferences are stored in the file called "Bookends 10 Preferences".

As for ignoring words when sorting, that's a function of the format, not Bookends preferences (the words are stored there, but whether they are used or not is indicated in the format definition).

Jon
Sonny Software
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