Sonny Software

I'm just trying Bookends out for the first time and playing with the demo version to see if it will be of use to me. It looks quite nice, I'm impressed so far. I'm not coming from any other citation software, so I don't have any other experience to compare it to.

The project that I am embarking on right now (and trying to systematize a bit) is a book with several chapters -- and I only want the bibliography at the end. This seems like a pretty basic use for such software. However, I'm not seeing how to do this -- whenever I scan a document (a chapter), the hits list seems to be emptied and filled with the hits from the most recent scan. What I need is a persistent hits list, so I can scan each chapter in succession and then generate a bibliography from that.

Am I missing something obvious? I haven't read every word of the manual, though I've read most of them several times, and this issue does not seem to come up.

Hi Paul,

There is no automatic way of accumulating references from multiple independent documents. So the easiest thing to do in this case would be to make one large document, scan that, and place the bib at the end.

There is a workaround, which is perhaps too involved to be of interest to you, but may be worth thinking through:

You could scan each chapter, without making a bibliography (uncheck this option). After each scan, the references found are in the Hits List. You could create a static group, 'cited refs', and after each scan add the hits to that group (show the Hits and right-click on the reference list). You will not get duplicates (if a ref is in 'cited refs', it won't be added again).

When you are finished, you can generate the final bibliography using the Biblio Formatter.

Jon
Sonny Software

Ah, ok. Your workaround doesn't sound too complicated, I can make do with adding to the static group each time.

So, perhaps then I'll put this in the suggestion box:

Maybe the scan window can have an option to add the hits to a static group (maybe selected by popup, unless it is common to have a whole lot of static groups), in order to avoid having to manually add them each time. If the choice made can be retained as the default for the next scan then it would save a few steps over adding them by hand. For this purpose, it might also be useful to have a checkbox (whose state defaults to off regardless of its setting on the previous scan) that will empty the static list targeted (in order to catch when references are removed, to be used on the first document scanned).

I suppose if this isn't in there by now, there's probably not a great deal of demand for such a thing, but if it were there, I'd use it.

Thanks for the help.