Sonny Software

I don't think the citation objects in Mellel are a good idea, and I don't use them. Is there a way to insert a citation into Mellel, without creating a "citation object"? Hitting cmd-Y always inserts an object.

In general, for any word processor, this would be a great feature for Bookends. You select a reference, or group of references, switch to the word processor of your choice, hit paste, and Bookends would insert the properly formatted citation or group of citations.

You want to insert the final form of the citation instead of a temporary object (I disagree about objects in Mellel, BTW -- they're great)? Easy:

You can either

1. Edit -> Copy Formatted

or

2. Drag and drop into Melle with the Option key held down.

Jon
Sonny Software

Hi Jon, thanks for the response.

This is not what I was looking for though. When you copy a citation from bookends, and in-text citation is inserted into Mellel as a "citation object" that consists of a Author, date, and a unique id, e.g. {Ashwell, 2006, #12345} Mellel abreviates this and displays it with a colored background. When "scanning" the document, this in-text citation object is replaced with a final, formatted in-text citation like this "(Ashwell, 2006)". (I'm not sure if Mellel or Bookends is the one responsible for formatting this final in-text citation, or if it's Mellel.)

I was wondering if you could paste into Mellel and get "(Ashwell, 2006)" directly in the text instead of the citation object with "{Ashwell, 2006, #12345}" inside it. If you're using another word processor such as Pages, when you copy the citation, you get "{Ashwell, 2006, #12345}" directly in the text. I was thinking it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to get Bookends to insert the final formatted citation, instead of the temporary one.

As for the citation system in Mellel, I think it is very dysfunctional. This is mostly Mellel's problem, (I think), so I'll keep my rant brief.

1) It breaks the WYSIWYG model of word processing. You insert temporary in-text citations that look nothing like the final formatted ones, such that, when you scan and produce the "final manuscript", it looks nothing like you intended it. Final citations are longer, pushing graphics, headings and other elements onto other pages where you didn't intend them. These changes are exaggerated with long documents, which Mellel is supposed to be good at handing.

2) Because of 1, you now have to go through this second "final" version of you document to make it look as you intended, fixing pagination and formatting of the final. Also, you may have to manually edit the in-text citations and bibliography because what you need is beyond the options of Bookends/Mellel (there are few cases have been discussed on this forum).

3) Now you revise your original, adding new citations and deleting others, or even just adding a few lines of text. Now you have to re-scan and produce a new "final" document, and, REPEAT all the changes that you did in 2 all over again. You have to do this every time you add or remove a citation. Lots of wasted time and effort.

4) Mellel (Bookends?) gives you no choice of where to place the bibliography. If you want a bibliography at the end of each chapter, or section you'd have to create a separate document for each each. Mellel has nice tools for managing and outlining multiple chapters/section, automatically labeling sections, figures, headers. So now these tools are useless if you want to write a book (or anything with more than one chapter) using citations and references.

5) You have to keep 2 copies of every document, wasting hard drive space causing potential confusion.


Here's how it should work.

a) You copy (cmd-y) a citation from Bookends into Mellel. The in-text citation is created as an object (as it is now), but is displayed using the final formatting according to the format you have chosen for that document (MLA, Nature, Science, APA, ...)

b) You indicate to Melle / Bookends where in the document you want your Bibliography(ies) placed, by inserting a bibliography object. At the same time, you indicate to the bibliography it's scope (whole document, just this section, etc.)

c) You scan your doc (manually or automatically). With each scan, the links from the citation objects to Bookends are confirmed (as the are now) and each Bibliography is updated accordingly. New citations cause entries to be added to the biliography(ies). Deleted citations cause entries to be removed from the bibliography(ies). All in the same document.

One document, always up to date always appears as it will when printed (or pdf'd, etc). WYSIWYG. Simple.

one09jason wrote:I was wondering if you could paste into Mellel and get "(Ashwell, 2006)" directly in the text instead of the citation object with "{Ashwell, 2006, #12345}" inside it. If you're using another word processor such as Pages, when you copy the citation, you get "{Ashwell, 2006, #12345}" directly in the text. I was thinking it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to get Bookends to insert the final formatted citation, instead of the temporary one.

The answer is that it can be done, easily. Again, it's done by using Copy Formatted. Create and use a format that outputs something like this:

(a, d)

Then, instead of Copy Citation, use Copy Formatted to place it in the Mellel document.

rant...

I can't comment on specifics, but I can say that we have also thought of something along these lines...

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon, that did the trick. Bookends is nothing if not flexible.

I hope that the Redlers (and yourself) can come up with the solution. I mentioned this workflow probelm to them more than two years ago, but I haven't seen any changes yet.

one09jason wrote:I mentioned this workflow probelm to them more than two years ago, but I haven't seen any changes yet.

They've been kind of busy...

Jon
Sonny Software

These are great suggestions, WYSIWYG is very important and I echo his frustrations of having to keep two documents, formatting two documents, etc. I eagerly await the Mellel/Bookends upgrade of these features.

This is an old thread, but I can't figure this out. How can we copy a permanent citation from multiple references with Bookends? E.g., (Sonny, 2019; Jon, 2019). The "Copy Formatted" trick results in separating the different items with line breaks.

Copy Formatted copies the bibliography form, not the citation form. Of course you can edit the bibliography options so that they actually output the citation. In that case after the citations are inserted, simply manually remove the returns and replace them with semicolons.

Note that this works but it inferior to scanning to generate the citations. There will be no reference disambiguation (e.g. adding "a" and "b" to dates), no Ibid., etc. But if your citations are simple and unambiguous it is OK.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks for the swift response.

That's too bad. I'm just trying to insert some citations into a simple slideshow, so scanning temporary citations doesn't work. The need to manually reformat after inserting kind of skips the point of Bookends in this use case.

Mark this down as a feature request for either Powerpoint scanning or for the ability to copy permanent citations without the copy-formatted-bibliography workaround, then!

It's not manually reformatting, at least not in any meaningful way, it's selecting the return and typing a semicolon to replace it.

If you mean using Copy Formatted to create the citation, then I mentioned how to do that. In the format, enter the citation options in the bibliography options tab -- now you'll be copying the citation.

Jon
Sonny Software

If you mean using Copy Formatted to create the citation, then I mentioned how to do that. In the format, enter the citation options in the bibliography options tab -- now you'll be copying the citation.

Yeah, but this isn't ideal, for the reasons I've mentioned (extra manual work required to make the copied citation fit) and you've mentioned (it's inferior to temporary citations).

It's not manually reformatting, at least not in any meaningful way, it's selecting the return and typing a semicolon to replace it.

For sure. Not back-breaking whatsoever. However, it added a few minutes to the slideshow I just created, because if I had four or five references to insert, this was the result...

boyd & Crawford, 2012


Chapman, Clinton, Kerber, Khabaza, Reinartz, Shearer, & Wirth, 2000


Lukyanenko, Parsons, & Wiersma, 2014


Lukyanenko & Parsons, 2018


Lukyanenko, Parsons, Wiersma, & Maddah, 2019


Parsons & Wand, 2008

Requiring manual deletion of about 15 linebreaks, five semicolon insertions, and then brackets on the front and back. Tedious!

Bookends could have taken care of the brackets for you -- what to surround citations with is configurable in the format being used.

Jon
Sonny Software