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Crashes and Sort Order Problems

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 4:14 pm
by mdd
I'm a new user to BE 8.1.3 and Mellel 2.0.1 and I'm experiencing some strange behavior. First, about every 4th scan or so, Bookends crashes. I thought this was only when initiated from Mellel, but it will do it from the Biblio->Bibliographic Formatter... dialog within BE, as well. It appears to happen just as it is formatting the output.
I'm using APA 5th, and it also doesn't seem to sort my bibliography correctly. for example, I get this (first 6 of 76 in my bibliography):

Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sutcliffe, A., & Mehandjiev, N. (2004). Introduction. Commun. ACM, 47(9), 31-32.
Mørch, A., Stevens, G., Won, M., Klann, M., Dittrich, Y., & Wulf, V. (2004). Component-based technologies for end-user development. Commun. ACM, 47(9), 59-62.
Girgensohn, A., & Shipman, F. M. (1992). Supporting knowledge acquisition by end users: tools and representations. Proceedings of the 1992 ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied computing: technological challenges of the 1990's, 340-48.
Bergman, L., Lau, T., Castelli, V., & Oblinger, D. (2003). Personal Wizards: collaborative end-user programming. In H. Lieberman, F. Paternò, A. Repenning, & V. Wulf (Eds.), (pp. 7-11). Fort Lauderdale:
Beringer, J. (2004). Reducing Expertise Tension. Communications of the ACM, 47(9), 39-40.

In general, it is obvious that most of the entires are sorted correctly, but then there are a bunch that are seemingly randomly inserted.
I checked in the settings for APA 5th, and sure enough the sort was set to Author, Date, Title. To see what would happen, I changed it to 1st Author, Date, Other Authors. However, the new setting wouldn't stick! It again did not sort correctly, and when I went back in, the setting had reverted. I thought maybe this couldn't be edited as one of the defaults, so I copied the format to a new one and tried to make the change there -- same result.

Am I missing something obvious here? Help!

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 4:46 pm
by Jon
Hi,

Have you tried to rebuild or repair the database (File -> Database Maintenance). This is the first think I would suggest for general weirdness.

If that doesn't help, contact tech support directly (support@sonnysoftware.com).

Jon
Sonny Software

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 5:45 pm
by mdd
I did that first... no luck. But, I think I know what the sorting problem is, at least. Apparently, the author names have to be entered Last, First (p. 112 of the manual). I wouldn't have expected that since BE can obviously parse them into the correct order to build the bibliography. I can fix the incorrect entries, but this is more than a one-time pain. Some of the online publishers I use (particularly ACM digital library) provide the data in First Last order, so everytime you add an entry, you'd have to correct it. You can put either automatically re-ordering these on import, or performing the sort after formatting or some other workaround on my wishlist.
Doesn't answer the question about not being able to change the sort order such that it persists in the Format Manager dialog.

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 5:54 pm
by Jon
Bookends import filters let you specify how the names are output by the provider, and it will automatically reverse them for you to surname first if you tell it to.

As for correcting names already entered, there is a Global Change -> Standardize Names option.

Please refer to the User Guide for more info on both of these features.

Jon
Sonny Software

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 6:21 pm
by mdd
Very cool... hadn't come across the global change option yet -- that just saved me a lot of time!
As for the imports, I guess I'd have to make a copy of the Endnote importer (since that's the format they use) and set it up for the particular site I'm getting the data from; I see if I can get that to work.
Thanks for your help!

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 6:33 pm
by mdd
OK, the global change fixed the sort order issue. It did crash again when I first tried to generate a bibliography; here's the first thread of the dump file:

Date/Time: 2005-11-28 17:26:16.767 -0500
OS Version: 10.4.3 (Build 8F46)
Report Version: 3

Command: Bookends 8
Path: /Applications/Bookends Folder/Bookends 8
Parent: WindowServer [65]

Version: 8.1.3 (Bookends 8.1.3)

PID: 579
Thread: 0

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x05dde080

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 BookendsCarbonLib 0x000ee344 disposeOfTemplateRecord54 + 28
1 BookendsCarbonLib 0x000f1354 0xc2000 + 193364
2 main 0x021719b0 0x2008000 + 1481136
3 main 0x0220c52c App.#HandleAppleEvent%b%o<App>o<AppleEvent>ss + 10756
4 <Unknown memory fragment> 0x00560298 0x4bb000 + 676504
5 com.apple.AE 0x914ab960 aeDispatchAppleEvent(AEDesc const*, AEDesc*, unsigned long, unsigned char*) + 208
6 com.apple.AE 0x914ab7fc dispatchEventAndSendReply(AEDesc const*, AEDesc*) + 44
7 com.apple.AE 0x914ab654 aeProcessAppleEvent + 284
8 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x93185940 AEProcessAppleEvent + 60

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 8:18 pm
by Jon
This forum is not the place for tech support. Please contact us at

support@sonnysoftware.com

and we'll see what we can do.

Jon
Sonny Software