A few newbie questions

[Dan]

Hi. I'm pretty new to Bookends, and I'm just now trying to produce a final document (in Mellel) for the first time. I've been reading the manual, but a there are a few things that are happening that I can't seem to figure out.

1. I'm working in MLA format, and when I produce the bibliography it will sometimes put letters after some years (e.g. 1990a). That would make sense if I was citing an author with two works published in the same year: Smith 1990a, Smith 1990b. But I'm not. Bookends appears to generate these letters for no clear reason, since not every year gets a letter. Is this a bug or have I somehow set some preference in the wrong way?

2. I've been able to set the paragraph style and font in which the bibliography is generated, but for some reason it always comes out in 12 instead of 10 point size. I've set the default font for bibliographies in the preferences to 10, but the program always generates it in 12 point.

3. Book and journal titles are always generated using underlining, but I'd prefer to generate them in italics. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Jon]

1. I'm working in MLA format, and when I produce the bibliography it will sometimes put letters after some years (e.g. 1990a). That would make sense if I was citing an author with two works published in the same year: Smith 1990a, Smith 1990b. But I'm not. Bookends appears to generate these letters for no clear reason, since not every year gets a letter. Is this a bug or have I somehow set some preference in the wrong way?

There's not enough information there for me to say. If the citation for two different references is the same, Bookends will try to disambiguate then with an appended letter.

2. I've been able to set the paragraph style and font in which the bibliography is generated, but for some reason it always comes out in 12 instead of 10 point size. I've set the default font for bibliographies in the preferences to 10, but the program always generates it in 12 point.

Mellel has bibliography settings that will override Bookends'. Check those.

3. Book and journal titles are always generated using underlining, but I'd prefer to generate them in italics. Is there a way to do this?

Of course. Edit the MLA format, replacing the underlined "t" with an italic "t" (no quote marks, of course). Please download the User Guide, which has all the details you need for creating and editing formats.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Dan]

Thanks for the reply. I completely missed how to set italic and underlining in bibiography; I've fixed that now and it's working fine. Same thing with the Mellel style override for bibliography font size.

But on the subject of letters attached to the years in the bibliography in MLA style, I'm still puzzled. Here are two cases:

1. I've got two articles by one author (Clark) but in two different years. In the bibliography they show up as Clark 1990a and Clark 1992b. That's not right.

2. I cite only one book by another author (Eco) but for some reason this book also gets a number: Eco 1984a. This happens for several other authors with only one item in the bibliography, but not for all books and articles. About 3/4 of the citations are just fine, with dates and no additional letters. In one case where an author did have two items in the bibliography with identical years the system worked perfectly: Mendelson 1976a, Mendelson 1976b.

[Jon]

Conceivably it's a bug, although I haven't received any other reports like this. Please reduce the manuscript as much as possible (ideally, to two references) and send it to me along with the minimum database required to do the scan successfully (zip them all first). If you've modified MLA, send that as well. I'll try to reproduce it.

Jon
Sonny Software