Overriding Interpreation of Curly Brackets {}

[Dixiedog]

Is there, perchance, a way to tell Bookends in a scan to interpret some {} as citations, but not others? Suppose that @ served this purpose, so that if Bookends scanned

... a recent paper {Jones, 1999}, which discusses a set {@1,3,5}

it would generate

... a recent paper (Jones, 1999), which discusses a set {1,3,5}.

My problem is that I would prefer to stick with {} as my citation indicators, but in some papers I need the {} to denote sets. I thought that someone else might have had a similar issue. It's no "big deal," since I can always switch to ~~ or [] for a given document, but I'd rather not so as to maintain configuration control, avoid errors, etc.

It's a long shot, but I though I'd ask the forum.

[Jon]

Bookends has a feature where if you use two curly brackets in a row, it will replace them with one, as in

{{1,2,3}}

will become

{1,2,3}

Frankly, I don't this was used much and I'm not sure it still works, but it's worth a try.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Dixiedog]

Ok, two experiments:

1. With Mellel, there is no issue because the first item, an actual reference would be entered manually, telling Bookends to see it, whereas the second bracketed item would not, and therefore would be ignored.

2. With Word, I tried a simple experiment and the double-bracket trick worked just fine.

Thanks.

Paul

[paulhagstrom]

I tried this out, and it's true that {{ a, b, c }} will turn into {a, b, c} after a scan without trying to look up a reference.

However, once I've scanned the document once, it's now turned all of my {{a, b, c}}s into {a, b, c}s, and so the next time I try to scan it, it will again treat the thing as a reference.

Did I do something wrong?

It seems to me that what it should be doing is, when it encounters {{, to turn it into { with the use of some field codes of the sort that mark regular references, to protect it from future scans like this, but as far as I can see, it doesn't.

Plus, it turns out that all three of the existing options for citation delimiters are problematic for me in the papers I'm trying to write, on formal semantics in linguistics. Brackets are used to mark [constituents], the ~ is an operator used to interpret focus, and {} denote sets.

Is there really no .plist file I can edit directly to change the character to something I don't actually use in the body of the paper?

[Jon]

Preferences are stored the Bookends 10 Preferences file, the access to which is via the preference menu option, and for a number of reasons arbitrary characters can't be used. If you have other suggestions for an ASCII pair, please make them.

Jon
Sonny Software

[paulhagstrom]

If you have other suggestions for an ASCII pair, please make them.

Thanks for the shockingly fast reply. I think for my purposes, it would be helpful to use two-character delimiters, if that would be an option. Something like |{...}| or {|...|} with a pipe and a bracket. A pipe alone could have some use in the body of the text, unfortunately. If the delimiter could be two tildes, that could work too (as in ~~citation~~). It's just that one ~ won't work.

It's possible that I can work around the problem by using BibTeX delimiters instead, but I haven't looked into how they work. If it's simply \cite{whatever would have been within the other delimiters}, then that's an easy enough switch for me to make.

[Jon]

I think BibTeX delimiters would work. \cite{} and \nocite{} should be recognized. Please give this a try on a small sample and see how it goes. If there are problems, please contact me directly for tech support (support@sonnysoftware.com).

Jon
Sonny Software