hypertext link

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 9:47 am

Jon,
The hypertext link and 'Groups' in the window menu are assigned the same shortcut, at least on my computer. Is this an oversight, or particular to me?

Danny

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 10:17 am

Hi Danny,

Good pickup. I'll have to change that. Any request of a particular unused keyboard shortcut (this is the closest we will get to open source...).

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 10:48 am

command-shift-G for groups.

Another thing I have noticed, the shadowed number beside a folder to indicate the groups within it will begin to overlap the folder name the smaller I make the group column.

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 10:50 am

That's right -- it's drawn at the right-most edge of the first column.

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 11:12 am

but you wouldn't want text overlapping, right? The group name should continue to disappear, not overlap.

Another thing I noticed while using the new verification from Mellel. There were a few ambiguous citations (not sure why), but in the resolve citations box, the down arrow on the scroll bar doesn't scroll the list.

Danny

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 11:21 am

The arrow keys are being filtered out by mistake. I'll fix that, thanks.

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 11:29 am

Jon, I'll just keep my problems in this thread if that is all right. In the previous post I mentioned how I had to resolve ambiguous citations. There are three in particular. They are lexicon entries, so there data is identical except for the title as well as the unique ID number. For some reason the scanning will not ask me to resolve these and will just continue and at the end warn me that some could not be found and my bib may be incomplete. I thought citing by author, date, unique ID would eliminate ambiguous citations, but this does not seem to be the case. So right now, my document is scanned except for those 3 citations.

Danny

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 11:33 am

The new Mellel/Bookends verify/scan process does things differently. Please export those three citations to a Bookends file and send them to me. I'll see if I can reproduce the problem here, and if so why it happens.

Jon
Sonny Software

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 12:19 pm

Danny, the problem with these references is that you put "et al." after the author's name. When Bookends inserts a citation, it outputs et al. to indicate that there are 3 or more authors. When it does the scan, citation with "et al." in them will not match a reference unless there are 3 or more authors. Since you put in the et al. (not Bookends), Bookends is fooled into looking for a reference that matches and that has at least 3 authors.

The solution is simple -- remove "et al." from after the author's name and the scan works just fine. If you really want et al. in the authors field, put it on the line after the first author's name.

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 12:58 pm

Thanks for this. Honestly, I'm not sure why i have et al there anyway.

EDIT: et al needs to be entirely taken out of the author field for it to work.

But this raises another question for me and that is the purpose of verification. For instance, in Bookends I took out the et al, then went to Mellel and went through verification. This brought the 3 citations in question for resolution, as I expected it would. I showed the dialogue box which citation was meant. Shouldn't this resolution process update the Mellel citation accordingly? Once I did the verification, I rescanned the document, and had the same problem, those three citations.

I would think that the verification process not only verifies that the citations are in the database, but updates the citation for Mellel and Bookends accordingly.

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 2:14 pm

You are correct. The "et al." issue is an exception. I'm going to fix it so that it won't cause this problem in the future (although you should still not put et al in the first line of the author's field, because that would cause problems with Word and other word processors).

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 3:24 pm

Jon,
I just had a flash of insight while using Quicksilver.

As you have mentioned, not all programs will accept the hyperlink (like Mellel). Can you create a menu item to copy the URL of the citation? That way the URL can be copied into programs that don't support the hyperlinks.

then the person can highlight the portion of text (i.e. the BE url) and tell quicksilver to open the URL.

OR

For those odd ducks who don't use Quicksilver, well just highlight the text and go to the Services menu and choose "Open URL" (and people can customize a shortcut key for the service menu item with Service Scrubber if they wish).

What do you think?

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 3:29 pm

You can copy the hypertext link right now -- it's in the Edit menu. But it's not plain text -- apps that won't understand the drag won't understand the clipboard link either.

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac · Post by **danzac** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 6:36 pm

You are misunderstanding me I think (or I am misunderstanding you!). Let me run it down for you:

I created the hypertext link from the edit menu and paste it into DT. I right-clicked the link and copied the URL. Then I went into Mellel and pasted the URL. It looked like this: bookends://sonnysoftware.com/12901

Now, that URL is not a live link obviously (it can't be in Mellel and other apps). But now I can highlight that URL in Mellel and then go to the services menu and choose "Open URL" (or in my case I use Quicksilver to open it) and it opens the citation in Bookends.

So basically what I'm asking for is a "copy URL" menu item- one that copies the plain text URL for the citation.

Danny

Post by **Jon** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 6:42 pm

Thanks for the clarification.

This sounds awfully narrow. Bookends' links already work with most of the applications that people have asked for (DT and Scriviner being two). I'm reluctant to add interface elements for what I think would be a small benefit to a small number of users (as you know) -- it's a prescription for application bloat.

Jon
Sonny Software