Sonny Software

Hello, I am one of many refugees from the collapse of Sente 6. I spent a lot of time considering my options and Bookends definitively wins for ease of migration and matching functionality (not all of it, but enough, and clearly more on the way).

I've also recommended Bookends to my friends who are in similar situations for the same reasons I picked it. In light of the ongoing migration, there are a couple of small things that could be done to make the process much, much easier.

1) While researching my options, I stumbled across DEVONthink, which is a fascinating piece of software that is not at all a reference manager, and found this really neat user-created script for extracting information from Sente

The key innovation of this script is that it can distinguish between Sente's user-created tags and automatic medline etc. tags, which Bookends currently does not. The key trick is that it accesses Sente's sqlite database and queries it with the following condition: " AND Assigner like \"Sente User%\";
Apparently there is an "assigner" property for keywords, and ones created by the Sente user will have "Sente User [name]" in that property.

The other thing the script does that I would love to see in Bookends' importing is that it distinguishes quotes from comments in annotations. Quotes, in Sente's annotation format, start with > and end with a single return. Putting in a line separator would make my old notes MUCH more readable!

2) If Bookends' importer can be modified to only pick up user-created tags, would it be possible for bookends to also automatically create smart folders from them? I'm going to go through now manually and basically recreate my whole filing system, which will take me a bit, but I can tell it has the capability to mimic Sente's hierarchical tags almost perfectly (provided you go through before importing and make sure every article with a lower-level tag also has the parent tag). Just something to save future migrants an hour or so.

I'm looking forward to using Bookends!

The script looks very interesting, but I'm afraid it's beyond my abilities to replicate for Bookends. We have some AppleScript exports on the forum, maybe one of them has some ideas?

As for annotations, Bookends should already discriminate between comments and quotes in the notecards it creates from Sente XML. It does for me, anyway. If you find it doesn't please contact tech support with an example Sente XML export and I'll take a look.

Jon
Sonny Software

Out of curiosity, how does the sente import process in Bookends currently work? I thought it basically was an applescript, since it goes through apple events.

It does. It's a simple AppleScript that tells Sente to export the references as a Sente XML file, which Bookends then imports. It uses the rules in the Sente AppleScript dictionary. The other script you referred to is much more complex and uses macOS APIs to read the Sente database directly (not going through Sente at all).

Did you confirm that Bookends imports quotes and comments correctly for you?

Jon
Sonny Software

Sorry for the long delay. Here's some screenshots of what happens with my Sente imports.

First, here's what I end up with in the note stream. These are all things that I highlighted and quoted in Sente, and then added a comment to besides, so each one is both a quote and a comment.


Then, here's what it looks like when I expand one of the notes.


The > is the start of the quote. My comment is just the last three lines (starting "So"). As you can see there's really no visual marker for where the quoted passage ends and my note begins. That's the main thing I would want. Even though it's not possible to recover the highlighting, just a line break (automatically inserted) to mark the end of the quotation would make it vastly easier for me to read my old notes.

I also see what you mean about the tags. I had hoped SenteXML tracked that info too, but it does not. How exceedingly annoying! Sente really did not do its users any favors on the way down.

You can't have an extra Return after the quote, because that signals the end-of-notecard.

It's possible to have a return + space + return, though.

You can do that yourself, but perhaps I should have that done on import, too.

Jon
Sonny Software

In the next update I'll have Bookends add an empty line between the quotation and comment on import.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thank you!