Import problem: formatted text

[SteveJ]

Working with a file imported a couple weeks ago (via XML from Endnote 7), I have just discovered a nasty little problem. Wherever the title field contained formatted text (e.g., an article titled "Nullius filius: A Study of the Exception of Bastardy in the Law Courts of Medieval England"--and yes, by the way, that's a real article!), Bookends has imported that field as rich text, which means that in the preview window, and in any bibliographies I generate, the title is given in 12-point Arial (not sure why that; is it Bookends's default?), while the rest of the citation--author, journal title, etc.--are in whatever font and size I have specified in the "General" tab in Preferences.

So (1) this is a problem with importing, which probably should be fixed. But my question is (2) is there some way of fixing this problem globally in the database I have already imported? I can see how to fix it manually (Select All in the title field, cut, paste into TextWrangler, Select All, cut, paste back into the title field, select the words "Nullius filius," Cmd-i to italicize them), but that's going to be a long, weary slog.

Thanks in advance.

[Jon]

This is not a bug, it is a feature (it took a lot of effort!). Bookends imports XML styled text info, if it is there.

Use Global Change -> Restore Default Font Style

to change fields of references in the database or just the Hits List to what you set in Bookends Preferences. Please see the User Guide for details. You will have to italicize Nullius filius again, but you can do that with a Global Change -> Find/Replace (replace with italics).

Jon
Sonny Software

[SteveJ]

Use Global Change -> Restore Default Font Style

to change fields of references in the database or just the Hits List to what you set in Bookends Preferences. Please see the User Guide for details. You will have to italicize Nullius filius again, but you can do that with a Global Change -> Find/Replace (replace with italics).

Jon--

Thanks for the response, but I don't understand. How, after turning everything to plain text, do I do a global search for everything that had italicized because it was a book title or in a foreign language? Because that's the only way to avoid fixing these things by hand.

Best,
Steve

[Jon]

Well, you wouldn't genernally italicize an entire book title in a reference -- that's done in the format. Usually it's individual words. For these, you can do a find/replace on a single field (e.g. Title). So, replace

E. coli

in the Title field with

E. coli (italicized).

BTW, I'd do this on a copy of your database because it is not undoable.

Jon
Sonny Software

[SteveJ]

Well, you wouldn't genernally italicize an entire book title in a reference -- that's done in the format. Usually it's individual words. For these, you can do a find/replace on a single field (e.g. Title). So, replace

E. coli

in the Title field with

E. coli (italicized).

BTW, I'd do this on a copy of your database because it is not undoable.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon--

By "book title," I mean a book title that appears within an article title, like:

Wendy Childs, "Resistance and Treason in the Vita Edwardi Secundi," in Thirteenth Century England VI: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1995, ed. Michael Prestwich, R. H. Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge, 1997), 177-91

The volume title (Thirteenth Century England VI...) obviously is taken care of in the format, but the book title that appears within the essay title (Vita Edward Secundi) cannot be. But the point is, as I said in my last, that for the most part these are not repeated from essay title to essay (I imagine that this is the only essay I have that mentions the Vita Edward Secundi in its title), and same is true about the foreign words that appear in titles. One who works in the humanities is not like a scientist who has two thousand articles with "E. coli" in the title; there will be tons of different Latin and French and German and Old English and Middle English and Dutch and Italian words that authors of essays have chosen to include in their essay titles.

So I'm gathering that there is no shortcut to fixing this. In that case, I'd disagree with your earlier assessment: though the preservation of styled text during import is an important feature, the way Bookends preserves it at present is, to this user at least, a bug. The important thing, surely, is to preserve italic text as italic text, in whatever font I choose to use, not to imprison a title with styled text in some font that it happened to have at one adventitious point in its life. That's how it works with a styled title I enter directly into Bookends, right? Once I fix the Wendy Childs entry (by hand!), and re-italicize Vita Edwardi Secundi, then I'll be able to change the bibliography font in preferences from Gentium to (say) Garamond, and the title will change to Garamond? That's what should happen with the import, in my opinion.

This isn't a big deal for me. I don't expect I'll have to do any more XML imports. I'm not sorry I bought Bookends, which still looks better than the competition for my purposes; but I'm pretty weary right now thinking of the hours I'm apparently going to have to spend fixing all these things by hand.

Thanks,
Steve

[Jon]

Well, Bookends could ignore font information on import, but I'm sure someone else would complain about that.

How about going about it the other way round...in EndNote can you globally change the font from X to default? If so, do that before importing -- Booknds will replace the EN default font with Bookends'.

Also, it's up to you of course, but the font really only matters for bibliographies (in some cases citations). Since I doubt you'll be citing all your references, it may be more cost-effective to wait until you need to cite a reference and, if it has the title field in a set font, change it at that time.

Perhaps I'll add a global font-only change in the future (it's quite a bit more involved than you may think).

Jon
Sonny Software

[SteveJ]

The global font-only change would be a good idea from my end. But, like several other issues for bibliographical software, the situations I've raised (like foreign words and book titles in essay titles) perhaps occur disproportionately in the humanities, and we're never going to be any software's most lucratic clientele.

Thanks for the help and the copious response, Jon.

Best,
Steve