I transferred a collection of 1,900 books from Delicious Library to BP and am now trying to edit the entries into greater consistency. I'm hoping to learn a few tips from experienced users.
1. Multiple Edit is like iTunes: select the entries, Cmd-E (or Edit button), and a Multiple Edit template appears for correcting various fields. Oddly, Title is not one of those fields. Any idea why? It's the field I most often want to edit.
2. Is there any way to do a Global Edit? Many of the titles put spaces before and after colons, instead of closing them to previous words. In EndNote or most other DB apps, it's easy to make that correction, but I don't see how in BP.
If this topic has come up earlier, I apologize. Did a search and found naught.
Editing tips?
-
teacher24_70
- Addicted to Bruji
- Posts: 94
- Joined: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:51 am
- Location: Kansas
- Contact:
I believe that the reason Title is not one of the options of Multiple Edit is because any changes you make in Multiple Edit effects ALL selected items. Surely you wouldn't want to be changing the title of ALL items to the same thing. If you typed "Star Wars" into the title, all items would take on that title.
If I misunderstood your question, forgive me.
If I misunderstood your question, forgive me.
Teacher is correct that the title is not part of the multiple edit as it's one of the most unique fields that each book should have; Nor is the multiple edit as advance as you hoped that you could tell it to remove all spaces before a colon in the titles. You can edit each title one at a time in the edit panel (command-e) or by double clicking the title in the table view. However to automate the process of editing the title and remove spaces before a colon you can do so by editing the database directly, for it is XML:
- 1) Make sure Bookpedia is not running
2) Navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpdia
3) Duplicate the info.xml file as a backup (this is the database).
4) Open the info.xml in a text editor like Text Wrangler or BBEdit that supports regular expressions that will let you remove all the spaces before a colon in the titles. (All titles are between the tags <key>Title</key><string>...</string>)
Thanks for your responses. The Title field is not unique, and it will often have consistent elements that one may wish to revise. Not substantives, but accidentals, like punctuation or spelling.
The free-standing colon is only one example. Some titles look like this: word ;: word. There you want to get rid of the semi-colon and close up the spaces. On FileMaker, Panorama. or Excel, that's a basic global edit.
The BP filter also could not recognize the string "space : space" . So I asked BP to show all Titles containing a : and then I went through and edited as Conor suggested, by double-clicking and manually correcting. Not a big deal for 30 or so, but a headache when it's more than 600!
Not complaining. BP is a huge improvement over D Library, and I'm a happy customer.
The free-standing colon is only one example. Some titles look like this: word ;: word. There you want to get rid of the semi-colon and close up the spaces. On FileMaker, Panorama. or Excel, that's a basic global edit.
The BP filter also could not recognize the string "space : space" . So I asked BP to show all Titles containing a : and then I went through and edited as Conor suggested, by double-clicking and manually correcting. Not a big deal for 30 or so, but a headache when it's more than 600!
Not complaining. BP is a huge improvement over D Library, and I'm a happy customer.