This thread has been moved here at Jon's request. Jon had written:
Bookends looks at the beginning of words because that's how words are indexed. It could of course look anywhere, but the "live" search would behave more like a "dead" search and be quite annoying to use. Some punctuation marks serve as a word separator -- I'm surprised at your example, because the apostrophe works as a word separator for me (antonio is found). Try rebuilding your database to make sure the indexes are current. And in general use Find or SQL search if you want more control over searches.
It's reassuring that the apostrophe works as a word separator! However, even after I rebuilt my database (with "keep user settings"), it isn't working for me. For example, if I have a reference with the word "l'uomo" in a title, typing "uomo" in the live search field won't find the reference! And searching for "antonio" in "dell'antonio" doesn't work for me, either: I have it entered as "Dell'antonio, Andrew". (this is true for "dead" search as well, if I specify "whole words"; the references are only found if I specify "characters"
Actually, no need to send a reference. I see that the apostrophe in the case of "l'uomo" is indeed not seen as a word break. Interesting, the apostrophe in "O'Shea" is treated as a word break. I think what we are looking at here is the way the Mac OS X handles word breaks (Bookends uses the system unicode collation routines for this). The rules it uses are complex (for example, a period is word break if followed by a letter but not a number). Since l'uomo is considered a whole word, seaching for uomo won't find it (with the Find either -- that's why you have to use the "character search", which doesn't use the indices).
I don't get it. Didn't you write that "antonio" was found? Did you put a space between dell' and antonio?
The same searches work with Sente 5 and EndNote X1; they appear to use a character search for the live searches. So you're convinced that character search in the live search field would be annoying?
The finding of antonio was a silly error -- I entered your text into a reference in which the author's address happened to be San Antonio, so when I typed "antonio" it found that reference (I said it was silly).
EndNote does not do a live search (and perhaps I missed it, but Sente does not appear to, either). A live search is when the search is updated with each character as you type. The Bookends live search is almost instantaneous, even for very large databases -- an unindexed search would be too slow for this. As I said, use a Find or an SQL search if you want to find a character string in the middle of a word.