Hi! I need to use Mellel and I can’t get Tinderbox to make footnotes compatible with Mellel. Does anyone know how to do this? Thank you.
Our footnotes are not Mellel’s; as far as I know, there is no way to import a footnote to Mellel.
I use more footnotes than the average computer-science bear, and I typically just us ad hoc markup (**footnote: …..). A few minutes of editing during the transfer takes care of everything. If a better approach is possible, that would be nice.
What exactly is it that you want to do?
If you want to get references ready for use in Mellel, Mellel integrates well with Bookends. So if you can go from Tinderbox to Bookends, then you could get to Mellel. Mellel imports Microsoft Word files, including footnotes, so if you export from Tinderbox to Word, then you can get to Mellel. If you write in Markdown, then you can eventually get to Microsoft Word and then to Mellel.
For what it is worth, footnotes limit how close to final drafts I can get in Tinderbox. Currently, I create footnotes as linked notes with an attribute indicating it is a footnote. I export my text as Word, then import into Mellel. Then I have an agent that collects all the footnotes. Then I add the footnotes manually in Mellel. Then I finish the writing in Mellel.
I would be very interested in better footnote workflows that begin in Tinderbox and end somewhere else, e.g. a Word file.
I would love to have a method that would allow me to go from Tinderbox to Mellel via Word, but it doesn’t work, except, perhaps, by going through RStudio which would then have to compile my document for Word so that I could then have it read by Mellel. This might be possible for an article or a communication. But the difficulty is out of all proportion when it’s a 300-page document with 500 footnotes. I can’t bring myself to manually modify my notes every time I compile my document from Tinderbox to Mellel. The publisher I’m lucky enough to work with has an editorial policy: I must place my references in footnotes and not in the body of the text. So for some texts, I’ll have to write directly in Mellel. Ideally, Tinderbox and Mellel would work together, like Mellel and Bookends, but I don’t know anything about computer programming and what’s possible or not. As for markdown, on the other hand, it works very well between Tinderbox and RStudio.
I would be very interested in better footnote workflows that begin in Tinderbox and end somewhere else, e.g. a Word file.
In this case, RStudio is for you.
Is there any documentation on how to import footnotes into Mellel? I can ask the developer, and ultimately will doubtless have to do that, but I’d like to know something first.
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As soon as I have some time, I will post a message to this effect on the Mellel forum.
Tinderbox already has a proven messages to export notes, with footnotes, when exporting to HTML (as document/page endnotes). Footnotes, as (page) footnotes are closely tied to final page render.
I think Word Processors, as type of text tool, tend to assume glosses like footnotes are generated inside the WP app rather than imported already assigned as such.
Paper print conventions of the footnote have note travelled comfortably to newer digitally native text formats. HTML has no formal element and ePub uses <aside> with a special element attribute to inside footnote status. I suspect part of the problem is where does a footnote go on the page when there is no page as such?
I understand and sympathise. That is my situation too and for one project, with 140,000 words of text and 220+ footnotes, I did the export manually once, i.e. export to Word, import to Mellel. Then I finished the writing in Mellel, before exporting to Word and PDF to send to the publisher.
I find the format for footnotes in Markdown obstructive to reading and writing, so I do not want to go that way. Also, I appreciate that Tinderbox has Mac-style text formatting like bold and italic, which are preserved in the RTF or Word export.
Note to Eastgate: an ideal solution for me and perhaps others would be able to insert footnotes either in the Tinderbox text pane editor (where they might be collected at the bottom say, like per note endnotes) or to be able to designate some in-text links as footnotes which would then be exported during the RTF or Word export function so that they were inserted as footnotes into the file in their “native format”.
This is tricky, because RTF doesn’t have a way to express footnotes. But perhaps something can be done.
I wonder if something might not be done. Attached is a file I created in Mellel. It is just a sentence, plus a footnote. I exported it to RTF and then verified that it opened in Word with the footnote preserved. I’m no expert on RTF, but the footnote seems to be expressed with these codes:
{\plain\cf0\up0\super\f0\fs24\chftn}{\footnote{\pard\ltrpar\ql\fi0\li0\ri0\lin0\rin0\tx180\tx360\tx540\tx720\tx900\tx1080\tx1260\tx1440\tx1620\tx1800\tx1980\tx2160\tx2340\tx2520\tx2700\tx2880\tx3060\tx3240\tx3420\tx3600\tx3780\tx3960\tx4140\tx4320\tx4500\tx4680\tx4860\tx5040\tx5220\tx5400\tx5580\tx5760\tx5940\tx6120\tx6300\tx6480\tx6660\tx6840\tx7020\tx7200\tx7380\tx7560\tx7740\tx7920\tx8100\tx8280\tx8460\tx8640\tx8820\tx9000\tx9180\tx9360\tx9540\tx9720\tx9900\tx10080\tx10260\tx10440\tx10620\tx10800\tx10980\tx11160\tx11340\tx11520\tx11700\tx11880\tx12060\tx12240\tx12420\tx12600\tx12780\tx12960\tx13140\tx13320\tx13500\sb40\
Perhaps this might be a breadcrumb that leads to others and somewhere nice.
Test RTF with footnotes.rtf.zip (1.2 KB)
Importing footnotes into Mellel probably isn’t very hard to do outside of Mellel.
Mellel documents are often said to be in a proprietary format, but it’s not hard to work with. A Mellel document is a zip file containing an XML file describing the document.
I’ve got some command line Python scripts that do mail merges, print style dependencies, and export Mellel’s probably underutilized Story Points to Aeon Timeline. One of these days I’ll use those scripts as an excuse to learn Swift and offer a nice Mellel utility to anyone who wants it.
Using Pandoc and Markdown, one can create a document in MS Word with footnotes from Tinderbox. Here’s a screenshot of my Tinderbox → Pandoc → Word export workflow demonstrating how MultiMarkdown footnotes are rendered in Word:
If this workflow is of interest to anyone, I would be happy to record a demo and provide an example Tinderbox.
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So if the target app were Mellel, I assume the process is:
- Write in Tinderbox using (CommonMark flavour?) Markdown to make footnotes.
- Export to Word doc from Tinderbox. Behind the curtain Tinderbox (→ Pandoc →) Word.
- Open word doc in Mellel.
IOW, once configured/tested, the Tinderbox export simply generates a Word DOCX, which the interim moving parts hidden from view.
That’s correct and this is how my export workflow works.
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The problem I’m having is a bit trickier than that: as long as it’s just a matter of putting markdown into Word format, Pandoc and RStudio work fine. But when it comes to export a note, from Tinderbox, that has a reference in Bookends format — {Albero, 2019 #26447}, for instance —, nothing works. Have you tried to repeat the test by inserting a reference in Bookends format so that it is read by Word and transformed into a citation?
I’m confused. Couldn’t you have Bookends process the resulting Word document and format the references? Pandoc also has extensive citation support.
For clarity, there isn’t a canonical ‘Bookends format’.
I’ve not seen this format but I know I could easily generate it. Bookends ships with over 300 publisher’s formats pre-defined. On top of that users can define their own. Think Tinderbox system attributes vs. user attributes.
There is perhaps an unintentional of confusing in-doc (word processor) document markers† that Bookends (and Zotero, Menderley, etc.) can scan as opposed to actual citation formats.
†. IOW, akin to a LaTeX \cite(citekey-value).
Mellel and Bookends allow indeed the user to enter a certain number of parentheses of their choice, {} or , for example. So that’s not the problem. Regarding Pandoc, it also works very well with Tinderbox and RStudio. I was able to export a large document written entirely in Markdown within Tinderbox. My problem is when switching from Tinderbox to Mellel: I need to make footnotes and I can’t make these notes manually myself every time I compile my document to rewrite my notes. Even using Word, the problem remains the same.
I think the poster is suggesting that citation markers such as {Albero, 2019 #26447}, inlined in the text, be converted to footnotes with the expanded citation in the footnote.
If that is correct, might not something like [^1{Albero, 2019 #26447}], piped to Pandoc, get us a Word document that behaves as we would like?
If so, I think the question of the footnote marker might be finessed. The ideal answer would be to number footnotes in a continual sequence throughout the book or chapter, and I think that is very common where references appear in the footnotes. But if we must restart the sequence with every page, I believe there is a tweak in Word itself that resets the footnote counter (or other counters such as Figure and Table numbers) at page boundaries or other points.
If chapter-wide numbering is acceptable, wouldn’t Mark Anderson’s HTML footnote solution provide a method? This would permit a Tinderbox ➛ HTML [➛ Word ] ➛ Mellel workflow.
(Claude reminds me that, in Word, Word: When you insert proper footnotes (not just superscript numbers), you might “go to References → Insert Footnote → Footnote options, and set “Numbering: Restart each page”)
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FWIW, the HTML footnote method was worked up in this thread.