Living Dangerously...with Bibliography

[jb]

I’m not the only Nisus user who has flirted with Mellel. Like others, I used it for a time when Nisus was reinventing itself for OSX, and have kept my eye on it over the years. One of the attractions of Mellel (aside from multiple footnote streams, ahem) is what they call ‘Live Bibliography’ with Bookends. This sexy thing nearly caused a trial separation at my house, until I realized I could accomplish ‘the same thing’ in Nisus.

My needs are simple, but I find that putting Bookends temporary citation markers into Comments allows me to keep the crucial info in the document while still being able to read the text. Yes, I have to type what I want to appear in the text, but with an in-text citation style (MLA, say) this ain’t so onerous. I just type something like ‘(Wackernagel 65)’ and add a comment to that text. (Yeah, for some style sheets this might not work too well.)

And scanning still works perfectly. What could be better?

Anyone else living so dangerously?

[Craft2science]

Sounds like something I might need, but don't fully understand. Can you post a pair of screenshots, one from each program?

[jb]

Hi,
There’s nothing to show in Bookends, really. You just use the temporary citation markers it generates in a somewhat unconventional manner.

This is the way Bookends temporary citation markers ‘normally’ appear:

Wackernagel has shown the difference ({&Wackernagel 1998 #46773@77-89}).

But since I don’t like having all that ‘code’ in my text, I just type what I want in my final text and attach a Comment with the ‘code’ in it, as in the attached screenshot.

It’s not really so ‘dangerous’ to do this, by the way. And don’t think that you’ll lose the flexibility of the citation marker: it’s still there in the Comment and if you want at some point to replace the Marked Text (the in-text text which has a Comment attached to it) with the content of the Comment itself, it’s easy to do. Have a look here for a macro that will do this:
http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5465

It’s even not at all difficult to write a macro that will allow you to use Bookends ‘as intended’: to get the citation marker into your text with CMD-Y and then, with the macro, move that citation marker to a Comment that is linked to the author’s name and date, say. This way, there’s very little extra effort, your text is much more readable, and you retain all the flexibilty offered by Bookends.

And just in case: you can turn down opacity in Comment Display Options (Tools menu) and hide Comment Pane. This hides all the 'ugly' stuff. See 2nd screenshot.

Let me know if this isn’t clear. Hope it helps.

James

[Craft2science]

This is great, thank you. I have not fully experimented with Nissus, either, since I just switched a few months ago.