Garbled formatting of the references

[Michel Mohr]

Please forgive me if I am asking something obvious.
I have been using Bookends for quite a long time in conjunction with Mellel, and Bookends has been a pleasant working companion.
Yet, a couple of days ago, Bookends has started acting out, without any recognizable change in the setup. It seems to be related to a recent update, but I am not sure and cannot reproduce the sequence of events having led to the issue.

Here is what occurs. The data in each of my 1800 bibliographic entries look fine when I edit a record. The formatted bibliographic entry at the bottom of the Bookends screen, however, now contains unwanted formatting, such as the tags \emph{...} instead of italics.
Same thing when I export a reference in Mellel or in any other application. This is unrelated to the type of format and the same problem occurs regardless of the style chosen, such as Chicago 15th B or MLA, etc. The other disturbing manifestation is that diacritical marks are now removed from the letter above which they should look. Example: "o¯" instead of "ō."

Let me provide a complete example of one bibliographic entry, first as it appears now, and secondly how it should be.
1. Adolphson, Mikael S. 2007. \emph{The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and So¯hei in Japanese History. }Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

2. Adolphson, Mikael S. 2007. The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sōhei in Japanese History. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

I am sure that this is not related to my particular computer or Mac OS X configuration (Lion 10.7.3), as I am synchronizing the data across my laptop and desktop every day. The same problem occurs on both machines. I have also tried to check the integrity of the database by using Library Maintenance > Verify.
Now I remember having seen the message "Some references require Unicode normalization." Could my problem be the result of this "normalization"?

I have backups of my library on an external disk, accessible with time machine. The only trouble is that I am not sure how long ago the problem occurred. I have tried restoring libraries created several weeks ago, but to no avail.

Please be so kind to provide a hint, because I am really lost.
Thank you in advance for your time.

[nicka]

Looks like you accidentally turned on BibTeX formatting. I would look in Preferences>BibTeX and see if 'Enable BibTeX' is ticked. If so, untick it.

[Jon]

The diagnosis is correct, nicka, but the solution is a bit different. Outputting in "BibteX" markup is specified in Biblio -> Bibliography Formatter. The setting there will be BibteX (in this instance) and should be changed to Styled Text.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Michel Mohr]

Jon, thank you so much for your precise guidance.
I don't remember how I managed to fool around with the Bibliography Formatter, but your intelligent advice allowed me to fix the problem.
Issue resolved!

[kstephens]

I once ran across this situation or something very similar to it as well, and it confused me for a long time. I kept getting plain text formatted views when I wanted styled text, and I could not figure out why. When I then suddenly started seeing HTML in the formatted view, I finally realized that a change I had made in the setting in the bibliography formatter affected the formatted view.

Might I suggest that some mention of the interaction between the formatted view (p. 73) and the bibliography formatter (p. 273) be made in the user manual?

[Jon]

The formatted display shows exactly what you'll see in a formatted bibliography. I'll add a comment to the User Guide section on the formatted display mentioning that it uses the settings in the Bibliography Formatter, with a link to that section.

Jon
Sonny Software