Importing genealogy references and scannning generated reports
Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:05 am
I plan to use Bookends to generate citations and bibliography for a detailed written report of the results of my family history research. I've been reading the Bookends documentation and have watched the videos. It seems that my intended use scenario for Bookends is somewhat different from the normal way to use it so I could use some help. Let me explain.
Up to now I have kept my bibliography in the genealogy program I'm using, Reunion for Mac. I plan on combining reports generated by Reunion with narrative text based on the notes I keep in Reunion. I will use Scrivener to do a lot of the actual writing and organizing of the work, and then transfer everything to Mellel to be able to do detailed footnotes, indexes, lists and bibliography.
I need the power of Bookends to be able to provide the citations and bibliographies. In doing my initial planning I have come to the realization that I'm going to have to do quite a bit of cleaning up of the bibliographic material I've already recorded in Reunion. Once I've done that I will need to transfer the bibliography from Reunion to Bookends.
That's the first thing I need advice about. I've already done some partially successful transfers into Bookends making use of the GEDCOM tags that Reunion uses to denote its bibliography fields. Does anybody have any suggestions about how I can make this transfer as painless as possible?
The second thing I need help with is as follows: Normally, once the references have been entered into Bookends, the in-text citations are created using Bookends itself. What I would like to do is have the Reunion program generate text reports that already include the in-text citations and then have Bookends scan the text to generate citations and biography.
I can tell Reunion to generate the reports using citations of the form [ReferenceNumber]. Bookends can work with in-text citations of the form {Author, Date, Unique ID}. I believe I can tell Bookends to look for [] instead of {}. If not, I can always write a script to change those characters to what I need.
The success of this approach depends on the answer to two questions:
- Is it possible to assign the value of Reunion's reference number to Bookends' Unique ID when I import the Reunion bibliography into Bookends? Or can I maybe use a different Bookends field to hold the Reunion reference number?
- Does Bookends correctly process in-text citations of the form {Author, Date, Unique ID} if Author and Date are blank, effectively using only Unique ID?
Thanks for any help or suggestions.
Matthew
Up to now I have kept my bibliography in the genealogy program I'm using, Reunion for Mac. I plan on combining reports generated by Reunion with narrative text based on the notes I keep in Reunion. I will use Scrivener to do a lot of the actual writing and organizing of the work, and then transfer everything to Mellel to be able to do detailed footnotes, indexes, lists and bibliography.
I need the power of Bookends to be able to provide the citations and bibliographies. In doing my initial planning I have come to the realization that I'm going to have to do quite a bit of cleaning up of the bibliographic material I've already recorded in Reunion. Once I've done that I will need to transfer the bibliography from Reunion to Bookends.
That's the first thing I need advice about. I've already done some partially successful transfers into Bookends making use of the GEDCOM tags that Reunion uses to denote its bibliography fields. Does anybody have any suggestions about how I can make this transfer as painless as possible?
The second thing I need help with is as follows: Normally, once the references have been entered into Bookends, the in-text citations are created using Bookends itself. What I would like to do is have the Reunion program generate text reports that already include the in-text citations and then have Bookends scan the text to generate citations and biography.
I can tell Reunion to generate the reports using citations of the form [ReferenceNumber]. Bookends can work with in-text citations of the form {Author, Date, Unique ID}. I believe I can tell Bookends to look for [] instead of {}. If not, I can always write a script to change those characters to what I need.
The success of this approach depends on the answer to two questions:
- Is it possible to assign the value of Reunion's reference number to Bookends' Unique ID when I import the Reunion bibliography into Bookends? Or can I maybe use a different Bookends field to hold the Reunion reference number?
- Does Bookends correctly process in-text citations of the form {Author, Date, Unique ID} if Author and Date are blank, effectively using only Unique ID?
Thanks for any help or suggestions.
Matthew