Sonny Software

I exported my Papers database in XML format, and imported it into bookends. PDF attachments whose filename has an apostrophe in them, such as for the paper "Multicomponent Rank Selection as an Alternative to Haldane's Dilemma"
appear in the XML file with an "'" instead of the apostrophe in the filename. These were not recognised by Bookends.
Search/replace through the XML file replacing all "'" with a single apostrophe seems to have solved the problem, and now bookends attaches the right PDF. Replacing it with "'" also did the job.
I think this is actually a bug in Papers, as I think this is what you would use if the filename actually contained "'" in it, which very few do...

In any case, it would be better if this happened on its own if you'd like lots of people to do his transision

I think it is a mistake by Papers (they are double-encoding the ampersand, which is not right). Bookends can't account for encoding mistakes by other applications. Bookends could fix this particular problem, but no doubt many other characters that have an HTML entity will be malformed, too. So patching this one particular character isn't really a solution. You should report this to the Papers team to be fixed. But for others who might run across this, as you saw, one can easily fix it in the XML file, and I can assist anyone who might need it.

Jon
Sonny Software

The same thing happened with ampersands when importing from Sente. I only noticed this too late to be able to fix the xml file. Find and replace within BE worked for reference fields. But I still have a number of references that are missing a correct link to the file. I've been fixing the link whenever I come across such a reference but I wonder if there's a way to fix them all at once.

You mean the name of the attachment is incorrect? No, there's no way to do anything about that in a global fashion. You can have Bookends show you references with orphaned attachments, though, and you can see and fix all of these in one sitting (one at a time, though).

Jon
Sonny Software