Jon wrote:Pages has nothing (AS support is not very useful for scanning).
That's unfortunate. I've read AppleScript: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg and had the impression that AppleScript indeed is very capable. Although I don't know what you need for scanning.
What I know, though is, that you would have a unique position in the Mac market if you could accomplish native Pages scanning.
Is it not possible to do scans on saved Pages files?
One way I would have thought it might be possible is to insert GUIDs into the text, and then scan through the index.xml.gz file in the Pages bundle, replacing all instances of the GUID with the correctly formatted citation.(In fact, I just tried this with a simple file, and it worked).
To create the bibliography, it might be a bit more complicated, but having had a quick glance at the AppleScript dictionary, it certainly appears possible to create a temporary .txt file and then import it at the end of the document.
Of course, GUIDs are nowhere near as useful (or as easy to read) as the placeholders in Word, but this would, at the very least, work.
I'd of course like to have Bookends do a better job with Pages, but there are many issues to consider. For example, footnote streams are kept independently of the main text. Without actually rendering the file, therefore, there is no way to know where citations in footnotes come in relationship to citations in the text. This makes it impossible to reliably use first and subsequent forms of a citation, for example, or to have numbered citations appear in the correct order if references are cited in footnotes.
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this, as well as deconstructing the Pages XML format. The solution isn't to make third party applications jump through hoops to come up with lame workarounds that only sometimes work, but to give us an API. Failing that, good RTF support would be a very good start (Pages '08 is better at this than its predecessors, but its RTF is nonstandard and it won't read back in things like metadata (comments, changes) or footnotes (it will read back a footnote into the body of the text)).
What everyone should ask for (and those who care have been, I think) is robust RTF export/import. That would make interactions with third party products (not just Bookends, but EndNote and Sente) feasible and reliable. Nothing is easy, but it really shouldn't be terribly difficult. Second, and harder (and less likely), open up Pages APIs that would let third party developers write plug-ins.
I can't imagine either of these, if implemented, would come as a small update, but would appear in a major release (Pages '09, or whatever).
Finally, Bookends *does* work with Pages. It inserts citations into Pages documents, and scans Pages RTF/RTFD files. The limitations are, as I mentioned, that things like footnotes and metadata will be modified or lost after the scan. For some people that won't be a problem, for others it's a showstopper.
Yeah, it's a show stopper for me. NIH grant proposals are limited in page-length, thus wrapping text next to the images, above and below tables, etc. etc. is an absolute must.
That's not a showstopper, I think, because it's not much work to move the images back where you want them after the scan (just a few minutes, I would think).
Why not do the experiment with a small psuedo-grant (or open in Pages '08 one you've done in Word)? I'd be very interested to hear back how well it did (or didn't) work (and I'm sure I'm not the only one).
You read my mind. That's exactly my plan to see how it goes. I have three proposals going in early Oct but a "pseudo-proposal" option like you have described can be the pilot study.
BTW, message sent to Apple requesting the changes you listed.