Generating an author index

[lyndondrake]

Hi,

This is the first of a few questions, all of which arise from a post I made on the DEVONThink forum a little while ago (https://discourse.devontechnologies.com ... dt/74644/1). I've finished my doctoral thesis off and I'm taking a bit of time to see if I can get Bookends and Mellel to produce similar output to what I can get from biblatex-sbl (recognising that the SBL style is an enormous pain to use, but I have no choice as it's the standard in my field). I have a customised version of the SBLHS2 format, and I'm trying to replicate the BibLaTeX features which meant I ended up using LaTeX for the thesis — and by the way, huge thanks to Jon for the ease of updating a synced BibTeX file, which I use constantly. One of the users on the DT forum has suggested that everything I'm trying to do is straightforward in Bookends, which I'm keen to do, so I figured I'd ask here. It's complicated because a fair bit of this is probably Mellel/Word rather than Bookends directly, or the integration between the two.

One of the things I'm trying to do in Mellel is generate an index of authors. In LaTeX/BibLaTeX I can do this fairly easily, with each page reference in the author index linking back to the PDF page where the citation occurs. I can't see that this is possible to do from Bookends, and it's not obvious to me that Bookends could have the information it needs to generate such an index, but another user on the DT forum said,

Not true. You create an author index via the Groups menu. You can then select and copy the names and paste them into other applications.

The screenshot the other user posted looks like a count of the number of references in the Group for each author, not an index of citation pages, but I thought I'd check (by the way, I can't find a way to generate this from the Groups menu, but I think the user above is referring to a Term List of Authors).

Thoughts on this?

Best,
Lyndon

[Jon]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you want. Please, in as few words as possible, post an example of what you want this author list to look like in Word.

Jon
Sonny Software

P.S. I saw you didn't know how to have Bookends convert an internal pair of parentheses into square brackets when scanning SBL. Please refer to the User Guide, the section on metacharacters in temporary citations. In this case you'd use [, in Mellel it would be [temp cite].

[Dellu]

I would say the poster in the DevonEVONt forum doesn't fully understand your problem.
He is talking about the list of authors. Yes, you can list out the cited authors using different methods. But, keeping them linked to the page where they appear is a different problem.

I think having an author index with the links back to the pages is a bit difficult to implement in Bookends. I havn't seen anyone doing that using any reference manager for that matter. The reason being that indexing authors is less common as they already appear in the reference list (redundancy). It is rather more common to index topics and subjects.

For that, my adice for you is to stick to bibtex environment to accomplish the task. There are a lot packages and tools made for indexing authors (authorindex packagehttp://tug.ctan.org/indexing/authorinde ... rindex.pdf for example) in the bibtex environment.

[Philologist]

I would say the poster in the DevonEVONt forum doesn't fully understand your problem.

I am the other poster from the DEVONthink forum, and I must say, you are right, Dellu. :–)
I misread what Lyndon wrote and thought he wanted a list of all the authors he had cited. Sorry about that. Mea culpa!

As far as an index of authors is concerned, one can create one in Mellel, but that requires that we first change citation objects with the blue background into text. To change a citation with a blue background to text, we click on the citation to select it, then hold down the Command key and press "c" (= copy) and then paste as a plain text.

When all Index Marks for Records have been successfully created, we can convert the text back to citations by executing the menu command Edit > Bibliography > Convert Text to Citations…

In Mellel this is time consuming. In Nisus Writer this is much easier because the citations are just text which can be manipulated by macros.

[Dellu]

In Mellel this is time consuming. In Nisus Writer this is much easier because the citations are just text which can be manipulated by macros.

That is interesting. I never knew you can do that with those tools.

[Philologist]

That is interesting. I never knew you can do that with those tools.

I forgot to mention, Nisus Writer can also create a list of all authors in the document and then use that list to create a (hierarchical or non-hierarchical) index all in one go!

[lyndondrake]

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you want. Please, in as few words as possible, post an example of what you want this author list to look like in Word.

Sure, here's a screenshot of a PDF page from my thesis document. These indices are relatively common in humanities books. Each name is an author cited somewhere in the text. The numbers following the author's name are the page numbers of those citations. This index is built by BibLaTeX as it runs through the document, and seems to correctly create index entries for all persons associated with a cited work (so if for example a journal article has three authors, all three of those people will have the cited page appear against each of their three names).

Screenshot 2023-08-05 at 3.21.33 PM.png (172.14 KiB) Viewed 8606 times

[lyndondrake]

I forgot to mention, Nisus Writer can also create a list of all authors in the document and then use that list to create a (hierarchical or non-hierarchical) index all in one go!

That sounds very useful. How can one do that in Nisus Writer?

[Jon]

Bookends doesn't know anything about the document, it has no way of knowing what page a reference is cited in (and could change at any time if you edit the document). That's something the word processor has to handle. Since Mellel treats citations as objects, it knows where they are. You might write to Mellel and ask if something like that is possible. And/or see what you can do in NWP.

Jon
Sonny Software

[lyndondrake]

Bookends doesn't know anything about the document, it has no way of knowing what page a reference is cited in (and could change at any time if you edit the document). That's something the word processor has to handle. Since Mellel treats citations as objects, it knows where they are. You might write to Mellel and ask if something like that is possible. And/or see what you can do in NWP.

Sure, I will do that.

[Philologist]

No doubt, it would be best to index names during the writing process itself, that is, as we plod along, but Nisus Writer also allows you to index an otherwise finished document and create as many indices as you want.

That sounds very useful. How can one do that in Nisus Writer?

One way is to extract the names from the bibliography and then use that information to automatically index the whole document. We would put the names into the Find box with "Or" arguments (is that the right term?) between each name using PowerFind Pro; then make a search which will highlight all occurrences in the document so we can index them all in one go.

Another way is to use an orthodox Nisus Word list method. This list is actually a two column table with the names in it. In this case, we would use the menu command "Index Using Word List…"

And finally, we can combine all the many small steps into two macros which automate everything. Why two macros? Because after we have created the name list we should give the user the possibility to check the names for consistency. The second macro will then use the list to finish the job.

Far from being a macro guro myself, I wrote two macros over the weekend which automate the process. If you want to see them, ask in the Nisus Macro Forum. There you will meet the experts who can help you with whatever question you have regarding Nisus Writer.

[Philologist]

You might write to Mellel and ask if something like that is possible.

Regarding an index of authors in Mellel, allow me to reiterate what I said earlier:

"As far as an index of authors is concerned, one can create one in Mellel, but that requires that we first change citation objects with the blue background into text. To change a citation with a blue background to text, we click on the citation to select it, then hold down the Command key and press "c" (= copy) and then paste as a plain text.
When all Index Marks for Records have been successfully created [in Mellel], we can convert the text back to citations by executing the menu command Edit > Bibliography > Convert Text to Citations…"

Creating an index in Mellel is a pain in the butt compared with the elegancy and swiftness in Nisus Writer.