Sonny Software

Importing a reference via Online Search (Lib. of Congr., e.g.) will routinely produce a reference with a space before a colon (or a semicolon) in title or other field. For example, I get "Title : Second Title"

I haven't tried all the libraries, but of those I typically use this seems to be standard behavior.

Is this produced by these libraries' output or by Bookends?

Is there, in either case, a way to get rid of this extra space?

Please provide a specific search. And take a look at the data as Bookends sees it (it's in the bottom pane of the search window). I'm pretty sure you'll see that this is what Bookends receives from the LOC.

Jon
Sonny Software

Right you are.
I hadn't tried to read the 'mess' in that window. (It's not so hard.)
I guess we'll all just have to remove those spaces...

Thanks.

You can periodically do a batch global change -> Find _: and replace with : (where _ is a space).

Jon
Sonny Software

I actually started to put all of my reference titles in this format: Great Book : This is What It is Really About

This has the advantage of allowing me to unify the separator between first and second part of the title easily. If you don’t do it like that, then you will have a mess of different ways of doing this in your bibliography:

Title—Subtitle (em-dash)
Title – Subtitle (en-dash)
Title - Subtitle (hyphen)
Title -- Subtitle (double hyphen)
Title: Subtitle
Title : Subtitle
Title. Subtitle

Using what seems to be a bibliographic standard " : " allows me to do a search and replace for those documents where the publishers prefer a ". " or a " – " or whatever other standard. The string " : " is great for this, because it does not occur anywhere else in my documents (as opposed to most of the other combinations).

This is a nice idea.

Do you then keep track of which refs you use in a given document and batch change just those? Or do you simply convert all in the database?

I don't know of an easy way to go from the document in, say, Mellel, to BE so as to find only the refs that are in the document. Is there a way? Perhaps I've missed it. (Of course keeping track of refs as they are inserted would be one way, but a bit tedious.)

Sure. Scan the Mellel document. All the refs cited in it are will be placed in the Bookends Hits List (marked). You can then perform global change operations on the hits, if you want, or make a new Group from the Hits List.

Alternatively, you can do this one-at-a-time by Option-double clicking on a citation in Mellel -- you'll go right to that reference in Bookends.

Jon
Sonny Software

I do this only as a last step in a given document. Doing this in the database seems risky, because I think I might have some titles that include some of the strings, for example

Arbeit – Interaktion – Diskurs : Zur Antropologischen Begründung der Gesellschaft
or
Film- und Fotoanalyse in der Erziehungswissenschaft : Ein Handbuch
or
Power/knowledge : Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977

So I check every new entry and change it if the import did not separate main and secondary title with " : " and do the rest before sending in the document to the publisher.

One more way the Hits list is valuable. I didn't know this (obviously).

Thanks to both of you.