possible problems

[drwagner]

I have found a few possible problems with Bookends. I outline them here.

1. White space in author list affects alphabetization. I've attached a screenshot of the citation window, but this comes up in a formatted bibliography as well. So if ordering is supposed to be by author, date, title, you can see that if the first author has extra spaces after his name, this moves the citation to the top of the list. To my mind, leading and trailing spaces should not be counted when alphabetizing. Would that be correct?

2. In formatted bibliographies where citations that are always cited together should be grouped and separated by semicolons, there is often extra space added at the end of citations, such that you get ". ; " between citations. I've attached a screenshot of this as well. I've verified that there are no extra spaces in my citation format definition. I have not tried to figure out under what circumstances this extra space is added.

3. In Word 2004, scan/unscan does not work in Page Layout View. You must first switch to Normal view to scan or unscan. Probably this is expected, but I'm not so sure.

4. Scanning/unscaning always results in closing the footnotes window in Word 2004. This may be impossible to change, but it's bit annoying.

I hope some of these issues may be addressed in a future version of this otherwise very useful software.
5. In Bookends, When using the search box to narrow results, if you get the result narrowed to one reference, you can click on the "Copy citation" button to enter the citation in Word, but the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Y does not work unless you first go click on the citation in the list. This does not make sense to me, as the citation appears to be selected already, even though it's sub-window is not selected. I would like the keyboard shortcut and the button to do the same thing, for consistency.

[Jon]

1. White space in author list affects alphabetization. I've attached a screenshot of the citation window, but this comes up in a formatted bibliography as well. So if ordering is supposed to be by author, date, title, you can see that if the first author has extra spaces after his name, this moves the citation to the top of the list. To my mind, leading and trailing spaces should not be counted when alphabetizing. Would that be correct?

I'll look into that.

2. In formatted bibliographies where citations that are always cited together should be grouped and separated by semicolons, there is often extra space added at the end of citations, such that you get ". ; " between citations. I've attached a screenshot of this as well. I've verified that there are no extra spaces in my citation format definition. I have not tried to figure out under what circumstances this extra space is added.

I can't reproduce that. Please send a zipped database, format, and simple Word document to tech support so that I can see what you're seeing.

3. In Word 2004, scan/unscan does not work in Page Layout View. You must first switch to Normal view to scan or unscan. Probably this is expected, but I'm not so sure.

I can't test this in Word 2004 because I no longer have a PPC Mac available. But it works here in the Page Layout View of Word 2008.

4. Scanning/unscaning always results in closing the footnotes window in Word 2004. This may be impossible to change, but it's bit annoying.

That would be a function of Word, not Bookends.

5. In Bookends, When using the search box to narrow results, if you get the result narrowed to one reference, you can click on the "Copy citation" button to enter the citation in Word, but the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Y does not work unless you first go click on the citation in the list. This does not make sense to me, as the citation appears to be selected already, even though it's sub-window is not selected. I would like the keyboard shortcut and the button to do the same thing, for consistency.

I'll look into that.

Jon
Sonny Software

[drwagner]

As a follow-on, a leading space in an author name causes the citation to rise to the top, a trailing space sends it down. Blank lines in the author field also cause alphabetization problems.

Extra space in multiple citations listed together was a fault of my citation format.

[Jon]

You shouldn't see the space issues in Bookends 12.

Jon
Sonny Software