The accompanying file ‘ProCiteOut’ is an output style designed to allow you to *export* your bibliography for use in ProCite (one of the leading PC and Mac bibliographical software packages).
1) Drop it onto the Load icon in the Citation Styles window to use it.
[If you don’t know how to load Citation Styles files see section 2.2.7 of the !Citation manual.]
2) Make sure that the export option in the Preferences window on the icon bar
menu is set to ‘Text (ignore tags)’. Elsewise, HTML, DDF, or RTF information
might creep in, and we don’t want that.
[See ‘Exporting Filetypes’ in section 9 of the !Citation manual.]
3) Once you’ve selected the references that you wish to export from !Citation,
then meander along to the ‘View and Output’ subsets menu.
Next, make sure that the Output subset option is set to ‘As Style’.
[See section 2.4.2 of the !Citation manual.]
4) Once that’s sorted out then you can press the Go button.
And that’s pretty much it.
Having said that though, there a couple of idiosyncrasies that you’ll need
to be aware of, and these are outlined below. Following on from that, are
some suggestions and hints and then a brief explanation of how to import
your material into ProCite.
THINGS TO WATCH (apart from Babylon 5)
--------------------------------------
1) Smart Quotes live in a slightly different place in Windows land, so if you
use them (and if not, why not?), then you may want to do a search and
replace on your text file once you’ve churned it out of !Citation.
Replace the left-hand quote (Alt 144) with Alt 145 (a right-hand quote).
Replace the right-hand quote (Alt 145) with Alt 146 (a point bracket thing).
For double inverted commas use Alt 147 and Alt 148 to replace the Acorn
equivalents.
2) Windows doesn’t support fl (Alt 159) and fi (Alt 158) ligatures, so if you
use these then you’ll have to convert them into standard characters.
The good news is that most other accented characters will transfer across
without a problem to the Windows version of ProCite. The bad news is that if
you’re transferring stuff into the Mac version of ProCite then just about
every accented character will go awry. Humph!
HINTS and TIPS
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All of the character formatting information such as the italicisation of book titles, etc. will be governed by the output styles available to ProCite. The same is true of punctuation, layout, and all of the other options. So there’s no need to worry about any of that - certainly you don’t want to add any formatting information to the ‘ProCiteOut’ style sheet or it’ll all go horribly wrong: you have been warned...
However, if you’ve used internal character formatting for specific references, such as italicising an individual word or phrase within a title, then you will need to attend to that. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to fix this once your bibliography is up and running in ProCite. Simply do a search (using the menu option View>Search within ProCite) to locate your formatting commands.
In the accompanying example file ‘ProDemo’ I’ve used the DDF tag ‘citalic’ to produce an italic style for use in Impression. So all I need to do is to search for all the occurrences of ‘citalic’ using ProCite’s search function, and then edit the appropriate references in normal word-processor fashion using ProCite’s italic, bold, and underline buttons.
IMPORTING INTO PROCITE
----------------------
Once you’ve exported your bibliography from !Citation using the ‘ProCiteOut’ output style, you’ll probably want to know how to coax ProCite into deciphering it. Here’s a brief explanation which you can use in conjunction with the accompanying Drawfile ‘ProDiagram’.
1) Load ProCite on your destination machine.
2) You’ll need to load an existing database, or create a new one using the NEW
option on the FILE menu.
3) From the FILE menu choose IMPORT RECORDS.
4) The IMPORT RECORDS window will materialise. Choose ‘Custom’ and then click
on ‘Set Options’.
5) Select ‘Other’ in the ‘Fields Separated With’ dialogue, and enter
a ^ (Shift 6) into the box.
6) Select ‘Other’ in the ‘Records Terminated With’ dialogue and enter
a @ into the box.
7) Make sure that the other options look like those in the displayed in the
‘ProDiagram’ Drawfile.
8) Click on ‘OK’.
9) You’ll then be back to the original IMPORT RECORDS window.
Click on ‘OK’.
10) The ‘Open’ window will appear to allow you to select and load the file that you wish to import (using the standard Windows/Mac method).
Try using the supplied ‘ProDemo’ file if you like to get you started.
You could even seek out some of the references and read them if you’re feeling adventurous...
