Sonny Software

I am very impressed with the increased formatting abilities with BE9, I have found that I am able to condense several different types of reference works into one (books in series, multivolume books, commentaries, can all now go into 'Book'), kudos to you Jon.

As I have been reformatting my SBL format files, a couple ideas popped off in my head of features that would improve formatting ability even more, so for what they are worth, here they are (please keep in mind that I am not a programmer and have no idea what these kind of features entail programming wise ):

~ We can use * to get the format to treat the field like author or editor. What about a character that can treat the particular field like the title field (to conform it to a particular case type)? And while we're at it, could we have yet another character that treats the field like an editor, and have the asterisk just for author (handy when the author and editor are treated differently)?

~ a formatting character that can treat the field as the journal field (i.e. so that it also uses the journal glossary). I am not sure if this would require more than just a formatting character, it may be that one specific field (say the bottom field of the drawer) would also become a field with a glossary if desired. This would be very useful, especially for us SBL guys: often times the book or journal has its own standardized abbrev., and the series or multivolume which the text belongs to also has its own standardized abbrev (there are alot of us SBL guys using BE)

~ One of the biggest pains for SBL formatting is that it does not standardize its cited page style, i.e. not every citation ends with comma-cited page-period. For eg., a journal looks like this:

Danny Zacharias, "Journal article Title," JBL 100 (2006): 19.

As you can see, it is colon-space-cited pg-period. But any secondary citation is simply

Zacharias, "2ndary title," 22.

BE handles the secondary way just fine, but I am stuck with two options for the first citation: do a find and replace of :, after the scan, or remember to cite with "\" instead of "@". This is the most common problem citation style, there is another (a journal reprinted in a book volume) that actually has the cited page right in the middle of the citation info (sigh), which BE (nor any bib.software) don't do, and it takes more than a find and replace to fix it.

All of that to give you my suggestion: what if we could simply place the sign "@" right in our format to signal to BE where we want the cited page to go. That way for journal, I can end my format with (d): @. Or for the more complicated type, I can place the @ sign right in the middle of the format. This saves us SBL guys (there are a quite a few of us remember) from having to remember to do find and replaces, and/or to use "\" for the first citation, but not the second, etc. This formatting ability would really simplify the whole process, so that no matter what kind of citation it is, all I ever have to do in my word processor is add "@19". I imagine this type of ability could be useful for other formatting styles as well.

Thanks for listening, Danny

**UPDATE**
There is one suggestion I forgot before, so I'll add it now for you to also comment on.
~ Is there a way to customize which reference types are shown in the drop-down menu in the reference window? There are only 13 references I use at this point (thanks to the robust formatting), and it would be nice if I could choose to have only those show in that drop-down menu (like in the way you can in the format window drop-down window).

Thanks again.

Hi Danny,

I'll go over these suggestions later. One quick point -- the * means treat the field like a name. Whether that name is treated like and author or an editor can be set in the format itself (first tab: under Names, "Others like: authors/editors"). That means, output names in user-defined fields as you would an author or an editor for that particular Type. I think this takes care of one of your requests.

Jon
Sonny Software

danzac wrote:~ One of the biggest pains for SBL formatting is that it does not standardize its cited page style, i.e. not every citation ends with comma-cited page-period. For eg., a journal looks like this:

Danny Zacharias, "Journal article Title," JBL 100 (2006): 19.

As you can see, it is colon-space-cited pg-period. But any secondary citation is simply

Zacharias, "2ndary title," 22.

BE handles the secondary way just fine, but I am stuck with two options for the first citation: do a find and replace of :, after the scan, or remember to cite with "" instead of "@". This is the most common problem citation style, there is another (a journal reprinted in a book volume) that actually has the cited page right in the middle of the citation info (sigh), which BE (nor any bib.software) don't do, and it takes more than a find and replace to fix it.

All of that to give you my suggestion: what if we could simply place the sign "@" right in our format to signal to BE where we want the cited page to go. That way for journal, I can end my format with (d): @. Or for the more complicated type, I can place the @ sign right in the middle of the format. This saves us SBL guys (there are a quite a few of us remember) from having to remember to do find and replaces, and/or to use "" for the first citation, but not the second, etc. This formatting ability would really simplify the whole process, so that no matter what kind of citation it is, all I ever have to do in my word processor is add "@19". I imagine this type of ability could be useful for other formatting styles as well.

Chicago style has the same issue, and I had a similar thought about how to handle it -- I think yours is a good suggestion.

Another wrinkle of Chicago style for journals is that, when citing a full article, the full page range is included, while the same format is used when citing specific pages, but with the cited pages replacing the full page range. So if the full article citation is like this:

Danny Zacharias, "Journal article Title," JBL 100 (2006): 19–26.

a citation of just a few pages will look like this:

Danny Zacharias, "Journal article Title," JBL 100 (2006): 20–21.

In order to handle this my journal formats do not include the article's page range, and I have to re-enter the page range manually using @ or \ when citing the full article. I would like to see this automated, along the lines of the proposal above, by indicating in the format that cited pages are to be substituted for the page range when provided: perhaps this could be handled by placing an '@' before the page field to indicate the substitution, so my journal format might end with (d): @p–.

hey Jon, I thought I'd give you a friendly reminder that you said you'd address these suggestions later.

One of the new things I appreciate come 9.0.2 is that ability to replace p- with the cited pages. This currently works only when p- is at the end of the citation. Is there any way p- can be replaced with cited pages even when it is in the middle of the formatting? this would address one of my suggestions. Thanks, Danny

Hi Danny,

That shouldn't be. Please check again and let me know -- pages should be supressed in the citation no matter where they are if there are cited pages...

Jon
Sonny Software