Sonny Software

Hi,
I'm working on a long manuscript, containing a lot of quotes and related footnotes.
I also have a separate RTF file containing quotes I've noted in recent years, listed by source. This is getting rather unwieldy.
Since I bought Bookends a couple of years ago, I've placed all the references to books in it, in most cases importing them via their ISBN number, gleaned from Amazon or other such online resources.
Now when I want to add a reference to a quote or other footnote material, I can import the reference to Nisus Writer Pro.
So far, so good.
What I don't understand, however, is how I should be managing my individual quotes.
Right now I have, for any given quote:
- The unique identifier of the source work, provided thanks to Bookends;
- The quote itself, usually in my ballooning "quotes.rtf" file. In there, the page number for each quote is unformatted, and therefore not part of any database;
- When relevant, a copy of the same quote in the manuscript I'm working on.
This seems to me inefficient: why should I have the book reference in a database, but not each quote from the book, along with its individual page number?
Should I be storing my quotes in Bookends, and if so, how? I've studied both the tutorial and the user guide, and I don't see any clear references to this.
Many thanks for any help.

It is probably easiest if you use the Note Stream feature built into Bookends. You can find more about this on page 76 of the User Guide.

You essentially separate quotes by a double line break and begin them with an “@" sign and the page number – like this:

@15 This is the nice quotation that I took from page fifteen. Maybe I am going to use this in my next article!

David,
It's not a bad idea to keep your quotations in a Nisus file, especially because of the extremely powerful Nisus search engine. You can find many quotations in a Nisus file at the same time just with one search (non-contiguous selection). You can't do that in Bookends, as far as I know.

The best thing is to provide each quotation with a temporary citation invoked by Command-Y ("Copy Citation"), generated in Bookends, at the end of the quotation. Don't forget to add the page number(s) too. That's all.

When you later write a paper in Nisus, you simply insert the quotation together with the temporary citation into the Nisus file. This would then look like this:

"Bla, bla, bla, bla and more bla bla". {Nies, 1999, #90375@56-88}

Hi Philologist,
Thanks for your message—that's in fact what I'm doing; my "quotes" file in Nisus is already enormous, and I precede each section with the Bookends-generated citation for the work in question. I then add "@page_number" to each individual quote.
Best wishes, David Sharp

A feature that you might find useful here is the ability to insert hypertext links back to a Bookends reference into a NWP document.

Option-Command-drag the reference into NWP, or use the Bookends Edit menu to copy/paste the hypertext link.

Jon
Sonny Software

I also use Nisus, therefore I'm interested in hearing how you do this.

You talk about "section". Are you entering a section break after each quotation? Why?
And why are putting the citation *before* the quotation? Normally the citation should follow the quotation, isn't it?

Jon wrote:Option-Command-drag the reference into NWP, or use the Bookends Edit menu to copy/paste the hypertext link.

On page 58 in the User Guide we can read:

"Not all applications accept Bookends hypertext links. Some that do are TextEdit, DevonThink, Scrivener, Tinderbox, Delicious Library, and OmniOutliner."

Option-Command-drag doesn't work with Nisus, at least not with my version.

Hypertext links can also not be copied to the clipboard and pasted into Nisus per Edit -> Copy Hypertext Link. Only "Copy Hypertext Link as Text" works.

The work-around I found is holding down Command and Option keys and drag and drop to a notecard. That will create the hypertext link. From there I can copy and paste it into NWP.

I tried it with the latest version of NWP (2.1.1) before I posted, and it worked.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:I tried it with the latest version of NWP (2.1.1) before I posted, and it worked.

Thanks Jon,
good to know that it works in 2.1.1.

Philologist writes:

You talk about "section". Are you entering a section break after each quotation? Why?
And why are putting the citation *before* the quotation? Normally the citation should follow the quotation, isn't it?

Apologies; my message wasn't very clear.
No, I'm not inserting section breaks into my Nisus file. The document simply contains a long list of works (mostly books), each one headed by a title containing the name of the author and the title of the work in question, and followed by the Bookends citation. Below that I type in the individual quotes, preceded by the "@" formulation with the page number.
You're right, it would be more logical to put the page numbers at the end of each quote, but it's no big deal as in any case I shall be copying any quotes that I actually use manually into my manuscript.
I'm something of a beginner with Bookends, and am learning as I go along.