congratulations

Reiner · Post by **Reiner** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:52 am

Hi Jon,

the acutal 10.0.3 update is damned cool! Thank you very much for enabling Mellel-attachments to be displayed. This makes my Bookends-Mellel-part-of-life much easier. Also the new attachment-tab is very handy.

(Even nicer would be if the text of Mellel attachments would be displayed in the default font for bibliographies set in the prefences, but that is a minor thing.)

Thank you very much again.

Post by **Jon** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:57 am

Thanks, Reiner, much appreciated.

BTW, the text is displayed in the default font for references, because I considered this to be similar to notes, not a bibliography.

Jon
Sonny Software

aechallu · Post by **aechallu** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 4:57 pm

I also found the ability to view Mellel attachments very useful. But I wonder if it'd be possible to preserve Mellel lists and autotitles in the visualization.

Perhaps using the Mellel2HTML XSLT transformation sheet to render Mellel files in the attachment file would work better.

Post by **Jon** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 5:10 pm

No it wouldn't, because Bookends will only render the html text, no styles.

The purpose of this is to allow you access to the textual content of these attachments so you can read them. It's not to render the original file. You can always double-click on it to open it in all its glory in Mellel (or Word for .doc files, etc.).

Jon
Sonny Software

Reiner · Post by **Reiner** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 4:42 am

Jon wrote:BTW, the text is displayed in the default font for references, because I considered this to be similar to notes, not a bibliography.

Thanks for that hint. Maybe there will be an own attachment-font pref in the future? I personally would prefer to have the text in the references fields as sans serif while long text as attachments (and notes) as serif text. Others may have other likings so maybe a pref for that would be nice. But this is nothing important it's just about to have a cherry on the cake or not.

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:46 pm

My congratulations too. It is a great update.

One very small point. For me, anyway, attached web pages display if they have a '.html' extension, but not if they have '.htm', even if they are otherwise identical. (I had a .htm attachment which didn't display and on a hunch I renamed it with .html and reattached and it shows up fine now.)

Perhaps in a future update bookends could recognise .htm as web pages too.

Post by **Jon** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 3:19 pm

Hi,

Thanks for pointing that out. Yes, .htm will be acceptable in the next update.

Jon
Sonny Software

aechallu · Post by **aechallu** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:04 am

aechallu wrote:I wonder if it'd be possible to preserve Mellel lists and autotitles in the visualization.

Perhaps using the Mellel2HTML XSLT transformation sheet to render Mellel files in the attachment file would work better.

Jon wrote:No it wouldn't, because Bookends will only render the html text, no styles.

The purpose of this is to allow you access to the textual content of these attachments so you can read them. It's not to render the original file. You can always double-click on it to open it in all its glory in Mellel (or Word for .doc files, etc.).

I disagree here, not on grounds of the idea behind the implementation (render "just" the text, not styles). It seems that bullet points and autotitles/headings are only lost in Mellel files. Any file format I tried other than Mellel keeps them. If I export the Mellel file to HMTL or Word, bullet points and autotitles (now headings) are kept. That's why I think that using mellel2html.xslt would help getting the document into html and then render it in all BE's purposeful lack of glory.

I also think that it would be a good idea to render HTML using webkit, since formatting in PDF attachments is also kept. But that's a feature request. I believe that not representing bullet points and autotitles from Mellel files is simply a bug.

Post by **Jon** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:09 am

No, it's not a bug at all. It's a feature that's not implemented.

Jon
Sonny Software

aechallu · Post by **aechallu** » Sat Sep 15, 2007 10:57 am

Granted, it was an overstatement, but it's fair to expect that bullet points and headings are rendered in mellel files as they are in word and html.

Post by **Jon** » Sat Sep 15, 2007 11:05 am

It has nothing to do with fair. Mellel XML separates out the autotitles and bulleted lists from the text stream. Bookends displays the text stream. I haven't looked into what it would take to display those in the correct order as well, but I suspect it would be a lot of effort for little reward. As I said before, this feature is intended as a handy way to quickly refer to text you have associated with a reference. If you want more, a double-click will get it for you. You could, of course, always save the Mellel file as a pdf and Bookends will display the fully formatted attachment, bullets, autotitles, and all.

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Sat Sep 15, 2007 8:02 pm

Will Leopard affect this Mellel issue at all I wonder?

From Job's keynote I recall that the new Finder with its quick-peak and plugin structure will make it 'easy' for programs to create plugins for the Finder. I would assume (really hope!) that Mellel will make that plugin for its users.

If that does happen, would BE be able to show Mellel files like they would show in the new Finder?

Post by **Jon** » Sat Sep 15, 2007 10:43 pm

I don't really know enough about that to be able to say. I would guess, though, that if something like that were possible it would be an image only, and you wouldn't be able to copy text from it, which you can with the current implementation in Bookends. We'll see.

Jon
Sonny Software