Sonny Software

hi folks,

Here's an interesting question: can I tell Bookends to scan the main document text for Chicago B (author date) and the footnotes for Chicago A (footnotes)?

This isn't as uncommon as it sounds, and is often seen in books. When quoting texts in the document, I want to use Chicago B (author date), as often I am quoting multiple passages on a single page, where footnoting would be inconvenient.

However, I am also footnoting various bits of text with supplementary information. In the footnotes, I should be using Chicago A (footnotes), ie the fully comma'd style. These full citations must also reappear in the bibliography.

Is there any way to tell Mellel to scan the body of the text for one format, and the footnotes for another? I think that's the nut of the issue.

Otherwise, I can't quite see a way around this, other than to do the footnotes by hand (ie copy in the formatted Chicago A to the footnotes, and then manually copy these same citations, now formatted as Chicago B, into the generated Bibliography once the chapter is complete).

Bookends doesn't actually know where the text is in the document (that is whether it's in the body of the text or a footnote). So Mellel would have to segregate one from the other and pass them independently and keep track of what goes where. In your case, depending on which you have more of, I'd scan the document with one format and then switch to the other and use Copy Formatted (Command-K) to replace the citations/footnotes you don't want with the ones you do.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon. Your suggestion is indeed what I figured I'd have to go with.

It would be intriguing indeed to see if there would be a way for Bookends to handle such a dual-scan. One way to do it would be to use a special character to determine the TYPE of citation (even better if you could tell Mellel what to look for).

Ie, if a citation had ¶ in its {}, it would default to Citation Style #1 (which you could set in the Prefs, ie Chicago A), and then if it had § in the {}, it would default to Style #2 (also set in Prefs, in my case Chicago B).

Given that this is how Bookends works already with its exclusions/inclusions markers — @, #, \ \, etc — I could imagine this as possible.

Now THAT would make Bookends quite awesome for publishing: being able to handle two citation streams.

Feature request for v4?

Well, it is a feature request (but we're way past 4). I don't know if it still works this way (haven't tested in years), but Bookends used to let you use {{ and }} to indicate citations that, once scanned, would be { and }. So you could scan again with a different format. Please try that on a small doc and see if it still works. Of course, if you do that you can't rescan.

Jon
Sonny Software

An alternative would be to use different citation delimiters for the text and the footnotes, e.g. { } for one and [ ] for the other. Then scan twice, changing the setting in preferences between the scans so Bookends looks for { or [ to indicate the start of a citation. (This won't work in Mellel, because citations are objects in that word processor).

Jon
Sonny Software