Sonny Software

Virtual tags will appear in the next update (soon). And you'll have the global option to display or hide members of a virtual tag.

Jon
Sonny Software

Already!? This is extraordinary, there really is nothing like Bookends! Thank you, Jon.

Thanks for implementing and improving this feature in such a nice way!

Now I am actually thinking about including a tag cloud of my top 100 keywords in my next job application. (One of the few, where they specifically ask for someone who has a broad research agenda, so that I don’t have to feel bad about all of the different things that found their way into the cloud.)

Thanks for adding this, Jon. I have a few suggestions on how the feature works:
1- the feature seems to work only with titles, notes, abstracts. It'd be great to add this functionality to Keywords. E.g. China is a keyword, it belongs to virtual tag "Asia" (or is is this implemented through the keywords term list?). I'd extend to any tag-enabled field (even authors).
2- stopping a term or doing anything with title, abstract and notes clouds is extremely slow. I don't know if it'd be better to have some kind of "edit cloud" mode, in which users can edit the tags and then apply changes all at once.

one more thing: is it possible to eliminate hyphens or similar signs that begin/end a word? (say as in comments --like this-- or in bullet lists
-like this.
thanks

Allowing keywords/names to be included in a virtual tag presents certain problems, because they aren't space delimited like words. So for now I've decided not to implement that.

If you have a large number of tags (tens of thousands) then the redraw time can be noticeable. I suggest you Shift-click to select multiple tags at once, then do them all at once (i.e. stop n words in one step). Of course you can add/remove stop words in preferences if you want to to a batch at once.

As for trimming words, of course I can do that, but what to trim? And each char I have to trim will add to the time it takes to generate the display (it's created dynamically in real time). I'm inclined to let the human brain sort that out.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote: As for trimming words, of course I can do that, but what to trim? And each char I have to trim will add to the time it takes to generate the display (it's created dynamically in real time). I'm inclined to let the human brain sort that out.

I examined the code and see that I actually had a (very fast) way to remove leading and trailing dashes, but because of a flaw in the logic only the first one was removed. I've fixed that for the next update, and words beginning or ending with one or more dashes will have them stripped off (a rare exception will be if the dash is the first character after a new line, in which case it won't be removed -- so if you want them removed from "bullet lists", put a space in front of the dash).

Jon
Sonny Software

I agree that unless tags are space-delimited, the situation can easily get unwieldy, especially with the recent addition of virtual clouds.

There is only one jarring imperfection that I can point out at this point: The names of virtual tags in the contextual menu ("Add selected tags to virtual tag") appear sorted by their time of creation, not alphabetically. This makes it difficult to find the proper virtual tag, especially when a large number of such tags has been created. Would it be possible to amend that in the future?

Thanks.

That would be trivial to implement. Anyone have any objections?

Jon
Sonny Software

It makes sense to me, too, and you'll see sorted virtual tags in Preferences and in the tag cloud contextual menu in the next update.

Jon
Sonny Software