Sonny Software

Apologies for the cross-posting (Mellel forum).

I seem to be experiencing trouble with the bibliography feature in Mellel (linked to Bookends). My trouble, I think, is what I perceive as a lack of control over how citations appear. I suspect many of the following are actually possible and would appreciate any tips on how to accomplish them.

In the body of my text or a note I would like to input a citation. The citation format is simple: “Redlers 2005â€

I'm sure there are ways of getting Bookends to produce the formatting you want for your citations, but before others weigh in with all that, here's a simple solution, based on what you wrote at the end of your post:

The simplest solution, to my mind, would be to have a manual override. I do not want Bookends or Mellel to change any of my citations. They should appear as they are input. While I understand the benefit of having them expanded by Mellel, etc., this should not be the only option.

You can do this by typing the text of the reference as you want it, as ordinary text, then following it with a proper citation object, as long as the citation object is set to not display at all in the final document. This is accomplished by putting an exclamation mark as the first character in the citation, so it looks like (eg) "!Redlers, 2005, #7449" (without the quotation marks). Scanning the document (in Mellel) will produce a bibliography as normal and set all the citations to display as thin non-printing lilac-coloured spaces.
See the manual around page 100: it's the section called "Creating removable in-text citations".

Thanks, Nicka.

Your suggestion might be the easiest way to override the setting.

Thanks,
Shayne

Shayne, your questions are hard to answer for me, because I do not know how you made your entries in the Bookends database. I’ll try to see if I can help you accomplish what you want without using the !-do-not-display-the-reference-at-all work-around that would have you enter all citiations manually anyway.
[quote="Shayne"]The closest I can get to what I want is by using the “Date Onlyâ€

Thanks for the suggestions Ozean.

I decided a number of years ago not to use a custom field (now specified) for original orthography in CJK names. Part of this is because of the (still) limited number of fields in BE. The idea is a good one, but only if you have unlimited fields. If I have two authors, I would need 2 fields; 3 authors, which is not unreasonable, 3 fields. But then some books are edited and thus contain editors’ names and authors’ names. I would need to assign at least 4 different fields just to get the CJK orthography of authors and editors. Obviously this is unworkable (and one of the reasons I and others have always asked for unlimited fields).

The way around this is to add the original orthography after the name and add a comma, which treats the name as a single unit, like an institutional name (please see page 17 of the BE manual: “If the author is an institution, place a comma after the last character and Bookends will not attempt to format it when creating a bibliography.â€

One possible solution that Jon might contemplate at some point, I suppose, would be some kind of markup so that the transliterations can be put in the same field as the name. This way, an author field could look like this:

Tanaka, Taro \ts??\tg??
Suzuki, Kenji \ts??\tg??
etc.

Where \ts = transliterated surname and \tg = transliterated given name.

EDIT: I see that Safari and/or this forum have turned my kanji into question marks, but the idea should be clear enough anyway.