Formatting the date correctly (only year / full date)

[Hauldhagen]

hi there..

slowly i'm getting into the power of bookends - but there is one thing i cannot figure out.

for internet-references i want to display the full date (12.04.2008), for books only the year...

but the checkbox for "only show year" changes everything.. itnernet, books, journals.. everything..

is there a way to show the full date only with internet references?


thanks a lot!
hagen

[Jon]

Hi, no, it's all or none. But for Internet you could use the field "Access Year" for the year-only and use that in your format.

Jon
Sonny Software

[strugatzki]

I'm having a similar problem right now.
But first my answer: Most citations only have a year, not a specific date; if you check "full date", those references that just have a year still will only be cited by their year. All those that have a full date entered in their field will have the long format. Since you only enter a full date in references where you need it, you should be fine - all the books and journal articles still are from 2008, the odd internet page or newspaper article from e.g. 20.03.2008 (using the German format).

That brings me to my problem: I'm running my OS in English, but I'm working and writing in German and hence all formats on my system are set accordingly. Bookends does not really give you control over *how* the date should appear in a formatted citation. There *is* an option in preferences, but at least in my case it does not change anything. A date will be shown just the way it was entered. Therefore, when I export from Papers, I end up with a date like "1942/11/05" in my document. Although Bookends correctly parses the year, it does not correct the date to my system settings. Any suggestions except coding my own Papers exporter (which I really might have to do)?

TIA
dominik

[Jon]

Hi,

Because of the many ways in which dates can be entered, or imported from other sources, Bookends doesn't "know" that what is in the date field is actually a date (and in fact, in many cases it's not, such as when people use it to store iterations of different publication dates). As a result, there is no implicit conversion that can be done between date formats once in Bookends. Sorry.

Jon
Sonny Software

[ozean]

Would it maybe be possible to say that Bookends will support one format as parseable, for example the ISO date format?

Since other fields also require input in a specific format (the comma in the names field, for example), it seems people might be able to adjust to this.

The suggestion would go somewhat like this:
If there is one four digit numerical entered, this should always be interpreted as YYYY. Everything else only works if it is entered in the standard ISO format: YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS

(This might also be nice for accessed websites and things like that.)

Of course it would be nice if the output could then be generated according to rules like

Code: Select all

DD.MM.YYYY at HH.MM h.

[Jon]

The problem is that for most people the vast amount of date info is imported from the internet (PubMed, WOS, libraries, Amazon, and so on). And each is different (even from a single source there is much variation).

Jon
Sonny Software