Importing Chinese references from Endnote 6 to Bookends 8?

Darius · Post by **Darius** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 12:30 pm

I have lots of references with Chinese characters in an endnote 6 library that I want to import to Bookends 8. ALthough endnote 6 is not unicode savvy, Chinese characters always seemed to display well. However, the difficulty comes when I try to export from endnote and either import into bookends or into endnote 8 - the characters just come out garbled. It seems that although endnote 6 can display the characters perfectly, it can't export them. The odd thing is that I can sometimes drag characters from an endnote 6 reference input window to a Bookends 8 reference input window and maintain the integrity of the characters, but it doesn't always work.

Any idea how I could get my endnote 6 chinese references into Bookends 8? The thought of having to manually input them all again is just too painful...

Thanks!

Post by **Jon** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 2:38 pm

It is an issue of encoding. Your EN data is probably encoded as MacJapanese, which is obsolete now that we have Unicode.

I wonder -- if you export the file as Refer, open it in TextEdit, and then save as a UTF-8 file, you might be able to import it into Bookends with all characters intact (set Bookends to use UTF-8 encoding for importing).

Maybe someone else who has done this has other ideas as well.

Jon
Sonny Software

Darius · Post by **Darius** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 3:12 pm

Hi Jon,
I just tried your suggestion but unfortunately it didn't work. Hopefully somebody else will have some suggestions. Even more painful than redoing the references manually would be to redo them only to find out there was a 5 minute process that would allow it to be done automatically....so I'll wait and see.

Thanks...

Rudi_Grams · Post by **Rudi_Grams** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 9:54 pm

Jon wrote:It is an issue of encoding. Your EN data is probably encoded as MacJapanese, which is obsolete now that we have Unicode.

I wonder -- if you export the file as Refer, open it in TextEdit, and then save as a UTF-8 file, you might be able to import it into Bookends with all characters intact (set Bookends to use UTF-8 encoding for importing).

Maybe someone else who has done this has other ideas as well.

Jon
Sonny Software

Maybe Cyclone can help?

http://free.abracode.com/cyclone/

Try to open your exported reference file in Cyclone. Specify the input character encoding as MacJapanese (or whatever it is) and the output format as a unicode format.

Rudi

Darius · Post by **Darius** » Tue Apr 26, 2005 10:03 am

Jon has been wonderfully helpful with trying to solve this problem, but we haven't solved it yet. I've managed to export my library from EN6 in ref, then open it in TextEdit with the default econding set to Traditional Chinese, then save it in UTF-8 with TextEdit. The problem starts here. I am able to see all the Chinese characters in TextEdit (and I tried opening it in Safari using UT-8 as encoding and that worked too) but when I try import into Bookends 8, nothing shows up. I sent the TextEdit file to Jon and for some reason he couldn't open it in TextEdit using UTF-8 or Chinese.

I'm stuck. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks