Importing accented characters

[brianogilvie]

Having just discovered Bookends, I'm trying to convert a moderately large EndNote library to it (about 2,800 records). I have successfully exported the library in EndNote (Refer) format. I can import it into Bookends, but any extended ASCII characters are transformed--accents, umlauts, and the like. For example, the character "í" is translated as "??". I have verified that the export text file has the right characters, so the problem seems to be in the import.

Has anyone else run into this problem? I use a lot of foreign-language sources and I really don't want to have to change every occurrence of an accented character (or worse, neglect an uncommon one and have weird references in my formatted papers!).

Brian

[brianogilvie]

Oops! The previous post has an error because of the way the Mac character set was translated. In fact, the character "í" is translated not as two question marks but as the square root sign followed by the does not equal sign. I can post a picture if that would help.

[Jon]

Hi Brian,

The problem is that the characters you exported from EndNote (version 8?) are encoded in Unicode, which Bookends 7 does not understand. So you see the MacRoman equivalent of the characters (the square root sign and so on). If you export from EndNote 7, I think the import should be OK (as EndNote 7 also did not work with Unicode).

Bookends 8 will be Unicode-savvy, so if you do the same import with it the characters should come out just fine.

Jon
Sonny Software

[brianogilvie]

Jon--thanks! I should have thought of that. In any case, a useful workaround for me was to open the file in BBEdit, copy the data, and paste it to a new text file. The new file was encoded in MacRoman, and Bookends read it just fine.

Brian

P.S. Thanks for the quick support, including my typo when I placed my order!