Bookends

Tinderbox supports import of data from Sonny Software's Bookends reference and citation manager.

IMPORTANT: dragging from Bookends has varying results depending on the modifier keys depressed. A constraint at the Bookends end of the process (i.e. starting the drag) is that for the modifiers (e.g. Option key, etc.) to be recognised and modify the Bookends behaviour the modifier keys must be depressed before clicking on the selected record(s) to start the drag.

Use with Bookends v11.2.9+. Used with Bookends v12.8+ there is support for dragging selections of multiple Bookends records.

Be aware that a number of aspects of the data passed into Tinderbox depend upon the currently selected export format in Bookends. Thus, selecting 'MLA' vs. 'IEEE' will give a differently styled result in Tinderbox. The options for this should looked up in the Bookends manual (or its support forum).

Drag result options

Note, the last-listed is the one likely of most interest to Tinderbox users:

Drag with no modifiers. Creates a new note and copies 'temporary' citation to both $Name and $Text, such as is used in word processing apps to mark where bibliographic links with be inserted. This is the equivalent of Edit ▸ Copy Citation within Bookends.
Option+Drag (⌥+Drag). Creates a new note and copies a formatted citation to both $Name and $Text, essentially this is the equivalent of Edit ▸ Copy Formatted within Bookends.
Cmd+Option+Drag (⌥+Drag). Creates a new note and copies a Bookends pseudo-protocol link (i.e. a bookends://...etc. URL) into the Tinderbox note's $URL field. This process is lightly covered in the Bookends manual under "Copying Formatted Citations by drag and drop". The process is described in more detail in the next section below.

Auto-importing reference data from Bookends using a dragged link

By using a Cmd+Opt+Drag from Bookends, a note is created and the Bookends pseudo-protocol URL is inserted to the new Tinderbox note's URL. This special URL content is detected and the following occurs, noting that as the drop is detected the note the user then sees has already had these changes applied:

Tinderbox polls the Bookends URL for data, which is as defined by the Bookends' built-in 'RIS' export format. See Bookends's Formats Manager (menu Biblio ▸ Formats Manager…) for more detail of what is contained. The default Bookends format has slightly differing RIS fields for 4 different types of references (books, journal, etc.) with 'journal' being used for any undefined reference type,By editing that export format, in Bookends, the contents of what is passed to Tinderbox can be varied. For most users/purposes such customisation is not needed.
The RIS data is placed in $ReferenceRIS should the user wish to copy addition details in addition to that auto-extracted.
If found in the RIS data:
- RIS abstract field 'AB' is copied to $Abstract.
- RIS primary title field 'T1' is copied to $Name.
- RIS journal abbreviation field 'JA' is copied to $Journal.
- RIS publication year field 'PY' is copied to $Publication.

Drag imports from Bookends are coerced to $TextColor, which improves interoperability in dark mode.

From Tinderbox v9.1.0, Bookends-imported date placed in $Authors retains the original author ordering as is needed for referencing. Prior to this $Authors was a Set type but changes in Tinderbox meant source data was being A-Z sorted.

IMPORTANT: the Bookends data import requires a modified drag (explained below). This means doing a Cmd+Opt+Drag (⌘+⌥+Drag) and also ensuring the Cmd+Opt keys are depressed before the drag starts. Failure to press the modifier keys first results in different data being loaded). The modified drag will result in:

creating a new note.
setting the note's $URL to a Bookends reference URI
set the $Text of the note to formatted Bookends reference. The styling/layout used will depend on the user's settings in Bookends. In most cases the result is the reference source data formatted for citation in that reference format (e.g. ACM, IEEE, etc.). With some references export format choices, like BibTeX, the $Text appears to be a form of code but this is the correct export for that format. Notes created by ⌘+⌥-drag from Bookends display the imported citation in the $TextFont, not Helvetica.
- WARNING: this will replace any existing $Text in the note.
apply the 'Reference' built-in Prototype (adding the latter to the TBX if necessary). Note this process is linked to the Network feature, so multiple newly added reference notes my appear to set their prototype one at a time, i.e. there may be a short delay before all new notes are prototyped correctly.
set a variety of reference-related attributes to Bookends-derived values (mainly attributes from the References group).
if an imported reference from Bookends is not valid unicode, Tinderbox rejects the import rather than risk a corrupt value of $ReferenceRIS.

See also—notes linking to here: