Editing bibliography to something non-standard

[roger]

I am not sure whether this is a Bookends or a word processor issue. I would be happy for the solution to involve Bookends, MS Word, LibreOffice or Nisus Writer. And sorry if this is covered in the User Guide, though I did try to locate it there. Maybe the answer is a simple page reference in the User Guide.

My problem is that when Bookends creates an RTF file containing a bibliography, the bibliography appears as a field that I cannot edit using, for example, a Sort command. I would like either to have Bookends create a bibliography that is regular formatted text, or to have a word processor convert the field into regular text. But maybe the answer is that I should be doing things differently, so I will explain why I want to do this rather than trying to do all the bibliography design in Bookends using the format editor.

I am preparing a book about a person, and I want to have three separate bibliographies: (a) The person's academic publications; (b) his popular writings (newspaper articles); and (c) publications, including newspaper articles, by other people. (I might decide also to separate his journal articles and books into two lists.) I have a bibliography format where I have prefixed all newspaper articles with [news]. So if the bibliography were regular formatted text, and not a field, I would be able to sort, cut and paste the references into the required arrangement, but none of my word processors allows me to sort the bibliography entries that are created by Bookends.

For the bibliographies for my subject, I can easily delete his name from single-authored publications using the word processor, so that they appear in the form:

(1969a) "The use of bibliographies", Journal of Writing 56(2), 456-9.

However, I will have to manually deal with multi-authored publications where I would want them to be something like:

(1970) (& A.N. Other) "Alternative forms of bibliography," Journal of Writing 57(1), 20-1.

Another problem is that sorting will fail to identify references where my subject is not the first named author.

Fortunately my my subject did not write many co-authored pieces, so this is probably manageable, though an automatic way of handling this would of course be more reliable, as I will probably have to do this several times as doing it will reveal mistakes that need to be corrected, each round of corrections leading to a new version of the manuscript.

Advice would be welcome, either on how to create an editable (sortable) bibliography, or on a better way of solving the problem. I thought about using getting all the cited references into groups, and then using BE's subject bibliographies, but this won't work because I need to generate suitable in-text citations.

[Jon]

Is the bibliography sorting that Bookends does not satisfactory? This is an option you set for your format in the Format Manager, in the Bibliography Options tab.

If it's not, or if you need to some other manipulations, in the scan dialog, UNCHECK "Retain Hidden Citations". For Word and NWP, the output will be styled text, not text in a field.

You can also convert the text in fields to regular text in your Word processor (maybe not Mellel, I don't know). But you can google for your preferred word processor and see how each does this.

Does this answer your question?

Jon
Sonny Software

[Philologist]

My problem is that when Bookends creates an RTF file containing a bibliography, the bibliography appears as a field that I cannot edit using, for example, a Sort command.

This seems to be a misunderstanding. The bibliography in Nisus Writer Pro is just text that you can treat like any other text in your document, including sorting. The same applies to the citations; they can be manipulated too.

After you scan a RTF in Nisus, citations and the bibliography will be displayed with a gray background. This has the same appearance as a field in MS Word, but it actually isn't one. You can change the color or remove it altogether in Nisus Preferences > Appearance > Marked Text > Field code

a.png (43.3 KiB) Viewed 12054 times

The "Field code" in Nisus is obviously only of importance if you import documents from Microsoft Word. The Nisus User Guide explains what it is on p. 575:
•Field code = 
any text from a document imported from Microsoft Word that uses features not implemented in Nisus Writer Pro, if these features happen to be saved in RTF via field codes (for example, a "BarCode" field code that inserts a scannable image of a postal address) 



In Nisus Writer Pro you can have as many bibliographies as you like.

I have a bibliography format where I have prefixed all newspaper articles with [news]

You could, of course, use all kinds of prefixes and special characters to create multiple bibliographies, but you would then have to delete these prefixes after you sort the document. I personally would rather use Static Groups, one group for each bibliography.

I thought about using getting all the cited references into groups, and then using BE's subject bibliographies, but this won't work because I need to generate suitable in-text citations.

Don't forget, you can always scan a document to "generate suitable in-text citations" while having a simultaneous creation of a bibliography or a Subject Bibliography disabled.

b.png (15.97 KiB) Viewed 12054 times

Each bibliography would be added by selecting all references in a Smart Group and then execute the menu command Edit > Copy Formatted > Bibliography

[roger]

Thank you for these very helpful replies. I now have multiple ways of solving the problem. The easiest is unchecking the "Retain Hidden Citations" option in BE which solves the problem instantly.

Normally the BE-generated bibliographies are fine and merely require minor formatting tweaks in a word processor, which is as it should be, but this time the publisher wants separate bibliographies for different categories of reference (Books and academic articles by Smith; journalism by Smith; everything else), so the BE bibliography has to be divided up into different categories. I thought about scanning the document three or four times, each time with a different custom format, but decided that even if this were possible it would probably generate non-unique in-text citations, hence the decision to create a single bibliography, with referencing having labels to indicate which bibliography they belong in, and then divide it up in the word processor. Of course, when I have done it, there is the possibility that the publisher may not like the look of it, and might suggest I omit newspaper articles (probably numbered in four figures) from the bibliography and place full details in footnotes, as I already do with manuscripts. In short, I take full advantage of the incredible flexibility of the Bookends format editor in creating custom formats.

[Chris]

I’m revisiting this older topic and I would like your assistance.

For a regulatory document, I need to compile two separate bibliographies within a single document: one bibliography for literature found using specific search terms and another for additional publications known to the author.

Is this something that can be accomplished with Bookends?

Thank you,
Chris

[Jon]

I'm not sure of the details of what you're after, but here are two ideas to consider.

1. A subject bibliography (details in User Guide).
2. Mark the references you want for one bibliography and use Biblio -> Bibliography -> To Bib Window -> copy paste into your word processor document. Then mark the other set of references and repeat.

Would these do what you want?

Jon
Sonny Software

[Chris]

Jon, you totally got what I was saying! I think the subject bibliography is exactly what I'm looking for! But I'm really not sure if I'm missing something.

I've put together a quick screen movie to show you what I'm talking about: https://www.dropbox.com/t/s9cARdLP59myijeQ

1. When I create a regular bibliography, both references are resolved in the text, and a bibliography with the two entries is created.
2. When I create a subject bibliography, both references are resolved in the text, but only the second one appears in the bibliography.

If I understand the user manual correctly, this might be the expected behavior. The subject bibliography is only created with Bookends > Biblio > Subject bibliography...

But what is the workflow? I first create a "normal" bibliography in Word to resolve the citations in the text, delete the bibliography, create the subject bibliography in Bookends and finally copy the subject bibliography into the Word document?

I have the impression that page 369 of the manual is a bit corrupted. The image at the top of the screen is in a strange place with text wrapping around it, and the mentioned popup menu image for the subject seems to be missing.

Chris

[Jon]

Hm, a quick test suggests that the subject bibliography scan works in Mellel but not Word. I'll have to take a closer look.

The PDF isn't corrupted, it's an issue in Pages where the placement of images far from edited text can be changed. I fix those when I see them, and I'll look at this section in the User Guide.

Jon
Sonny Software

[iandol]

Just to add for those who may be open to an alternative: use a markdown writing system with Pandoc filters that automatically handle multiple bibliographies:

https://bcdavasconcelos.github.io/citet ... tibib.html

There are lots of other nice features of this sort of workflow, but it does require some setup...

[Jon]

I see the problem when scanning a Word document and creating a subject bibliography -- it's fixed for the next update. For now, you can do such a scan and then go to Biblio -> Bibliography. The subject bibliography should be there. Copy/paste it into your Word document. When 15.0.4 is available, you won't have to do this.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Chris]

Many thanks for the quick fix of the subject bibliography! I was wondering if it would be possible to also add "Smart Groups" if the subject criterion is "Groups". Only "Static Groups" are currently offered.

Chris

[Jon]

You can use smart groups in a subject bibliography now. Like any subject/term, to see it listed as an option it must have at least one member that is a hit (marked). This is true for static groups, authors, editors, etc. Bookends won't offer a subject to group by if it has no references that are hits, and therefore nothing will be output.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Chris]

This is very strange! It doesn't seem to work with my installation. I have sent you a screen video via WeTransfer.com.

Chris

[Jon]

Yes, I've replied to you. It looks like the problem isn't with smart groups but with matching a reference when you scan. I suggested you Rebuild your library and try again. Let's continue this via the tech support email channel, not the forum.

Jon
Sonny Software