BE wants to created two entries from one citation in Mellel when scanning

[lmperez]

I'm having an issue that may be either something going on in Mellel or Bookends when scanning my bibliography. (I am mostly confident this belongs here, because I can re-create the issue as explained below, but if this should be over at Mellel's forums, no worries.) Thanks in advance to anyone who can direct me to how I can sort this out. (I'm assuming it's something I'm doing wrong but haven't excluded the possibility that it's a bug in either BE or Mellel.)

My basic workflow is the following:

1. Writing with Scrivener and Bookends, exporting to RTF, then
2. Changing Bookends to work with Mellel, opening the RTF in Mellel, then
3. In Mellel: Edit > Bibliography > Convert Text to Citations

This method worked over the summer. But several updates later in both apps, including going from Mellel 5 to Mellel 6 means I'm unsure where the issue is. But now, I cannot seem to get Mellel and Bookends to communicate properly.

All citations become dynamic with Mellel's red dashed-lines to indicate they are ambiguous citations. When I attempt to verify, Bookends reads multiple citations in every line. I get a prompt for the author last name and the year.

When attempting to re-create the error, it happens even when bookends inserts the citation directly. For example, in the first image, the citation {Brands, 2014, #102556@1} was inserted by Bookends; when I ask Mellel to Scan the document, Bookends begins like normal, asking what kind of bibliography I want to use. But then it attempts to verify both "Brands" and "2014". Then it will produce two entries for that same dynamic citation.

cite-1.jpg (220.13 KiB) Viewed 9473 times

cite-2.jpg (220.65 KiB) Viewed 9473 times

I select the same citation for both "Brands" and "2014". When the scan finishes, it creates two citations in the same footnote where there was originally only one.

If I select "none of these" for the year, Bookends throws an error "nil object".

cite-4.jpg (42.3 KiB) Viewed 9473 times

[Jon]

Did you by any chance change the citation separator from a semicolon to a comma in Bookends preferences?

Jon
Sonny Software

[lmperez]

Did you by any chance change the citation separator from a semicolon to a comma in Bookends preferences?

It would seem that I have although I don't know why I would have done that. Many thanks. Problem sorted. I knew it had to be something I was doing wrong.

[lmperez]

Quick follow up question. Looking at my old draft from last January, I have it using commas instead of semicolons. (I must have set it up that way. But oddly, until recently that wasn't an issue.) Is there an efficient way to have Bookends convert all the citations into using semicolons? If not, that's fine. I with some careful grep searching, I might be able to just find/replace my way through each chapter when I begin revisions.

[Jon]

Try a proofreading scan (see User Guide for how that works). I think that will do it.

Jon
Sonny Software

P.S. The separator will be set to a comma if you enable BibTex and tell Bookends to use citekeys. There is a warning when this happens.

[vinschger]

May I ask why you use scrivener and then Mellel? I am writing everything with microsoft word, but I am interested in other apps and workflows. May you share which advantages you see in your workflow and especially why you are using two writing apps?

[lmperez]

Try a proofreading scan (see User Guide for how that works). I think that will do it.

Jon
Sonny Software

P.S. The separator will be set to a comma if you enable BibTex and tell Bookends to use citekeys. There is a warning when this happens.

Thanks, Jon. I use BE to manage things for both working in plain text (pandoc/quarto) and Scrivener/Mellel. I suspected in your first post that is were I must have changed it. I've already got a note to myself to write a short workflow when switching between plain text writing and Scrivener/Mellel writing.

[lmperez]

May I ask why you use scrivener and then Mellel? I am writing everything with microsoft word, but I am interested in other apps and workflows. May you share which advantages you see in your workflow and especially why you are using two writing apps?

I have to main workflows. I'm a college professor. For anything shorter than an article (~10,000 words), I write in plain text using Markdown and Pandoc to create the final document. This works great for things like formatting syllabuses, Canvas assignments, web articles and the like.

But for my book, I wanted a way to both manage the much much longer word count (50k words and climbing), as well as allow me to "focus" on smaller chunks of text when writing and revising. One thing Scrivener does extraordinary well is splitting up a large document into smaller bits. This is great because often a small section that begins in say "chapter-1, section-2" ends up in "intro, section-4" or "conclusion". I can take snapshots of the progress, set word count goals for sections, and research files. (Most of the research files are in DEVONthink but it helps to have some of it in Scrivener.) When I'm finished, I can export into RTF or Word and then work on final changes before submitting. (If you're really technical, you can export to plain text and then still run Pandoc on a markdown file—but that is not' necessary for my workflow.)

Finally, although most of my writing happens on my Macbook Pro, I do a lot of pre-writing, notes, and thinking-writing on my iPad. So with Scrivener and Bookends on my iPad, I can do that reflective and idea generation writing at a coffee shop, late at night when the kids are asleep, whatever, and then sync it all so that it's ready when I get back to my office where my laptop spends most of its time (docked to monitors).

I'm a firm believer in using whatever workflow works for you. If Word works… use that. If there's something it doesn't do, first try to articulate to yourself what you want to do and then (and only then) go looking for a setup. My desire to be off my laptop as much as possible when I'm off work pushes me to get as far as I can on my iPad Pro. I used Scrivener & Mellel for my MA thesis back in '09–'11 (with a defunct citation manager I can't even remember). I went to Emacs and a Biblatex file for my PhD. In both cases I was exclusively on my laptop for all but a handful of tasks. Now that I want a single manager that works with both Mellel/Scrivener for long-form writing and exports to a .bib file for writing plain text documents, switched to Bookends (which is fantastic).

[vinschger]

thank you so much for your detailed description of your workflow. So you are using pandoc mainly to convert markdown files to another format using different CSS stylesheets?

[lmperez]

thank you so much for your detailed description of your workflow. So you are using pandoc mainly to convert markdown files to another format using different CSS stylesheets?

Nope, I don't do much web stuff and I've never sat down with CSS (I should as I'd like to know it, but it's a complete mystery to me).

I have a handful of LaTeX templates that I use for creating academic manuscripts, my syllabus and the like. Many of which are just borrowed from around the net and then slightly modified. But the vast majority of the time, I only set the margins and fonts in the markdown YAML and work with the Pandoc defaults. I rarely need anything other than a PDF, and when I need something else, I create a .docx file (for colleagues who work in Word) or .rtf for when I need to do something in Mellel after making the document—but both cases are usually low single-digits for any given academic year.

[Philologist]

I'm a college professor.

For STEM subjects? Am I right?

I'm trying to understand your workflow. I can't see any reason why an English teacher, for example, would want to use LaTeX to create academic manuscripts, syllabus and the like.

For anything shorter than an article (~10,000 words), I write in plain text using Markdown and Pandoc to create the final document.

I am wondering why you don't use Mellel or Scrivener for that too. Does it have something to do with your iPad?