I found the same in the end. The thing is that most PDFs how have the metadata and all you need for citations really within the pdf itself. I don’t use that method any more really. I use BookEnds really so that the citation is properly formated if I copy and paste. Though I stil find myself endlessly fiddling with citation formats. Any answers to that one!?
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@lyndondrake, perhaps you’ll be interested: Scrivener + Quarto: a technical/academic publishing workflow - #45 by bernardo_vasconcelos - Scrivener - Literature & Latte Forums
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@Bernardo_V oh yes — I remember reading that initial post and getting very interested before telling myself off and going back to the writing and editing!
I’ll find some time this week to download that sample project and try it out. It certainly looks like you’ve already done most of the work. Quarto is a bit of a game changer too I think, and seems to have quite a bit of momentum behind it which is a great sign.
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I’m not sure if it’s a better way, and I’m not writing a dissertation or anything, but my workflow is to dump all of my citation information into Bookends, and since it creates a static UniqueID for every source, I use that number everywhere in my related notes in DT.
Aside: I’ve fiddled with Bookends citation templates, but since my use for it is genealogy, the information I need to include for each source usually has too many details/variables, so I have three custom fields in Bookends: footnote citation, first citation, and short citation that I fill in manually. I looked at using EndNote, but EndNote generates dynamic IDs.
I save all the digital copies of a source in a Bookends Attachment folder in OneDrive with the beginning of the filename updated to match the Bookends UniqueID and then attach the file to the Bookends record.
That attachment folder is indexed in DT. Once a file shows up in my indexed DT folder, I add the DT link to a custom field in Bookends, and I add the Bookends UniqueID to a custom metadata field in DT, and then in DT I create an annotation for it from a custom template, which generates a link to the source in Bookends from the custom metadata field.
My default annotation template pulls in the BookendsID from the custom metadata field, so as long as I remember to add the Bookends UniqueID before creating the annotation, DT does a bunch of magic for me. Part of my template is a section on source information with a reminder that “all of the info should be in Bookends not the annotation but here’s the space for it if you’re being lazy”.
When I want to review all my notes on a source, all I have to do is search for the ID. (I don’t specify the metadata field in my search, since that is only for the actual source, but instead do just a plain text search.)
The downside of using the custom annotation template is if I’m in a hurry and don’t delete the parts of it I don’t need, DT’s See Also thinks a whole bunch of files are related when they really aren’t. But that’s on me.
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Thanks, I only really have very standard citations. Even then it can get fussy I found, nice solutions. There is, I note, a lot of scope for invention using these apps and that is one thing I really like about them. I hope Jon the Bookends guy sees this one.
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It’s interesting that you mention complex genealogical source citations. I am writing a book (cited via Chicago style endnotes) that depends heavily on government records and am finding similar issues with idiosyncratic citations. The US National Archives, for example, often preserves agency file structures in their entirety. Census and other genealogical information similarly doesn’t fall neatly into a collection/box/file system
All of my annotations are in DEVONThink, so if I really am stuck writing custom manual citations for ~80% of my source documents, is it even worth adding a citation manager?
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Depends on your writing flow. When I’m drafting in Word or another word processing program, I enjoy being able to merely insert the bookends ID and then after I’m ready, have Bookends scan the document to insert all the citations. Since Bookends allows modification of how the citations will appear, I just have that linked to the footnote field instead of trying to do Author, Title, etc. To each his own, though.
So a draft might look like
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas laoreet.1
1 {#123456@237}
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Yes, that’s a feature I should be using more often.
Your dissertation is in Education. I don’t know if you need extended equations and fancy, lavishly decorated layouts, but if you don’t like Word, Nisus Writer Pro might be an alternative for you. Nisus has Track Changes which are fully compatible with Word (in case you need to collaborate with committee members), and it can convert .docx faithfully. — But you would then also have to switch from Zotero to Bookends, like I indicated earlier in this thread. Zotero only fully works with MS Word, LibreOffice and GoogleDocs.
Could you upload your Word template or tell me where I can access it? I would be very grateful if you can do that.
If you have multiple temporary citations in your document you are likely to soon forget what {#123456@237} is supposed to mean. In the Formatting Manager, under “Citation Options”, why don’t you instead choose ‘Custom’ and then enter a: s d (for books) in the corresponding field, or something similar. That will give you a unique temporary citation: author, short title, date. Instead of the cryptic {#123456@237}, everybody can understand that.
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Yeehaw! Congratulations !I’m frantically working on my dissertation and have used devonthink all through my PhD program. It’s been incredible for sifting through research
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I know I’m late responding to your post. But there is one App that can solve the challenges you are facing and that is the excellent writing tool Mellel. It is deeply integrated with Bookends and has Live Bibliography. There is no gap between your “final output” and working with citations (no compiling). It is also excellent in the field of Biblical Studies since it has extensive support working with Biblical languages and apparatus. It’s made for long documents like Scrivener. I’m surprised it is not mentioned more often. https://mellel.com/
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I’ve used Mellel extensively, including for a couple of papers recently, and Bookends is my main bibliography management app. There is quite a bit for the SBL style which can’t straightforwardly be achieved with the combination of the two tools, though, which is why I still use LaTeX/BibLaTeX. For example, there are some complexities in the SBL citation style which BibLaTeX deals with and I’d have to do manually in Mellel/Bookends, and with BibLaTeX I can easily include a comprehensive and accurate list of abbreviations, including the silly requirement that certain lexicons need to have their bibliographic listing in the abbreviations table. It’s one of those things where once you go down the rabbit-hole of the style guide (which is exceptionally long and complicated) it becomes increasingly frustrating!
What I love about Mellel is its multi language support and especially its excellent RTL support, which makes working with Hebrew text fantastic. Bookends is also excellent and the author has been super responsive at support requests. I use both apps a great deal.
All of this is a bit distant from DEVONThink — but one DT-related point is that I have done a few scripts to sync up my bibliography database to DT, because I do all my reading, annotation, and note-taking in DT, especially because DT2go is such a joy to use for reading and annotation.
It has actually occurred to me that it wouldn’t be impossible to use custom metadata and some scripting to generate bibliographic database entries from DT itself, or even rich text bibliographic citations (the latter could offer an option for Mellel citations). I’ve made a few initial steps towards this but won’t have a proper go at it until I’ve finished the manuscript for the monograph I’m trying to produce from the thesis, as it’s all a bit complicated. But the flexibility of DT has pushed me to use it more and more over time.
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Thank you for sharing this in detail. If you feel like sharing your scripts, I would be very interested 
I have asked you this before, but I got no answer. Please give an example of the SBL citation style which you can not reproduce in Bookends.
I also find your problem with classical sources not convincing. I assume you want a final citation to look something like this:
Arist. Metaphysic 996b5-8
I created a new Reference Type in Bookends and called it “Classical Primary Source.” Every time I enter a book by Plato or Aristotle I choose the type “Classical Primary Source” instead of “book”.
You can also create a list of abbreviations in Bookends, so I really don’t understand why you need LaTeX for that…
Where exactly (in the dissertation) do you need to write those abbreviations?
Sure, here are a few:
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an article cited without a locator should show the pages of the journal for the entire article; this doesn’t work with the included SBL style as far as I can tell.
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a number of specialised SBL entry types, such as entries in lexicons or articles in encyclopaedia, require the footnote citation to reference the entry’s or article’s bibliographic data, while the bibliography cites the lexicon or encyclopaedia as a whole, of course without duplicates for all the different volumes. There may well be a way to do this with parent types, but I couldn’t figure it out.
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it is common to have footnotes which include a citation, which then needs to be within parenthesis, so that the usual () parentheses in the citation style should be modified to (and so on in any nesting. This doesn’t work with Mellel/Bookends.
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certain reference types need to appear as bibliography items in the abbreviations list. For example, see the output below, which
biblatex-sblcorrectly produces automatically for COS, while retaining the more typical mapping of abbreviation to long form for other reference types:
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also note the distinctions correctly made by
biblatex-sblin the italicisation of certain reference types in the abbreviation list, which I haven’t been able to replicate in Bookends. -
also, to my knowledge, there is no way to request Bookends to provide this abbreviations table, which must appear as a section in the front matter of the book.
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not SBL-specific, but BibLaTeX also makes it easy to produce an author index, which I don’t think is possible from Bookends.
I’d actually much prefer to use Bookends and Mellel if I could, so if you’re able to suggest ways to get Bookends to produce these I’d be super happy! BibLaTeX in particular but LaTeX more generally often drive me round the bend.
It’s a bit off-topic for the DT forum, but to flip things round, what would be convincing to me is a Mellel document or Word document which replicates biblatex-sbl-examples.pdf from the biblatex-sbl distribution. Quite a few of those examples in BibLaTeX rely on related fields in the .bib entry, and there must be something similar in Bookends, which would no doubt be a start, but that document to my knowledge is impossible replicate through Bookends (in Mellel or Word).
All a while ago so I’m not sure if they still work tbh!
Also Bookends has added a really good import system from Zotero, and the scripting support in Bookends is amazing. So my instinct if you’re looking at this is to focus on Bookends, as my way of getting stuff from Zotero was a bit cludgey really.
@lyndondrake
I asked you for concrete EXAMPLES, but you still keep on giving me abstract descriptions. Why?
I think I begin to understand your frustration now. You are making one fundamental mistake. Don’t think you’re supposed to stick to the SBL style format that ships with Bookends. Make a copy of it, then tweak the copy to suite your needs!!!
Just to make sure I understand you correctly, when you say “locator”, do you then mean the URL (the uniform (or universal) resource locator)?
Again, nothing could be easier than that! You just need to make sure that the Citation Options are different from the Bibliography Options in the Formatting Manager.
After reading your description, all I can say is that in Bookends you can choose (), , ) or Nothing.
Bookends can also create automatically an abbreviation list for you. You just use one of your custom fields for the abbreviation and create a new custom format which you can call “Abbreviation format”.
Believe me, you can also do this in Bookends, it just needs some simple fine tuning.
Not true. You can create this list automatically via Biblio > Bibliography > Bibliography Window
Not true. You create an author index via the Groups menu. You can then select and copy the names and paste them into other applications.
I have already tried creating a separate format (in fact, I’ve created several of my own in Bookends), and none of your comments address what I’m after (for example, you haven’t generated an author index, but an author reference count).
As I say, if someone can replicate the biblatex-sbl-examples.pdf, nobody would be happier than me, but I have not been able to. In the end, by the way, it’s just a choice of tools, and I don’t have any obligation to use Bookends more than I do (and again to emphasise I use Bookends every day). I found it much easier, in the end, to use BibLaTeX, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It might well be that I’m just not as competent as you are at using Bookends, which is also fine, but your ability wasn’t a resource available to me when I was choosing which tool to use. I tried using Bookends for this, couldn’t get it to work for me, and used another tool and managed to get the job I was working on done. Now that I’ve finished the DPhil, I’m keen to revise my tool usage and I am working on getting Bookends as my bibliography formatting tool so if you’re able to help me with that I’d be most grateful.
For the details, I’ll post these examples on the Bookends forum, and I’d encourage you to chip in over there with your solutions.
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For reference management, I am using Bookends and Zotero. They can work together wonderfully.
- Bookends can sync to bib file
- Zotero can sync to bib file via BetterBibtex add on
Then, the exported bib files can be merged & sorted (automatically) using bibtool (via Hazel).
The merged and sorted bib file can be searched and inserted (with different format), universally, across all types of apps such as DT and Scrivner using Alfred (Super charged citation picker is very effective).
BE’s floating citation is also very flexible. We are living in a wonderful world.
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Yes, I have already done that. But you haven’t posted any examples yet on the Bookends forum.
https://www.sonnysoftware.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=6032&sid=49e41897280d0d3f22b900aa62b4ea9f
Not being a LaTeX user myself, I finally managed to find this PDF you were talking about. For those who don’t have it, it can be found here:
If you are still interested, you can point me directly to examples which you find problematic in that PDF. I’m willing to help and see if they can be output in SBL format in Bookends.
One final thing:
“Pages of the journal for the entire article” is a phrase that sounds rather hazy to me. Are you referring to a journal article with multiple page locations and volumes ??
If so, then that would be p. 19 in David Purton’s Biblatex-SBL Examples and Test File.