New bibliographical formats a possibility?

I love how Logos offers some different bibliographical formats you can use when copying from a book. Unfortunately, however, none of them correspond to the format I would like to use (which is the format used at the Pontifical Biblical Institute).

I wrote the Zotero (a free bibliography program) style for the Pontifical Biblical Instite (http://www.zotero.org/styles and then search for pont), and was wondering if something similar could be done for Logos. I'm not sure how they styles are saved on the hard drive and if they can be modified or a new one created. Is such a thing possible?

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Comments

Rosie Perera

It's not possible currently, but you should post a request in the Suggestions forum that Logos create a way for users to do custom bibliographic formats (e.g., the way we can do custom Copy Bible Verses styles).

fgh

Normally, the best way to get something like this to Logos' attention would be to start a thread in the Suggestions forum. However, given how involved you've been with this before, and that you, as I understand it, are offering to help with it, I've written an e-mail directly to Andrew Jones, the Catholic Product Manager.

Just FYI, are you aware of logos4catholics.org, http://www.facebook.com/logosforcatholics, and http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002466079494&sk=wall?.

Rosie Perera

I've written an e-mail directly to Andrew Jones, the Catholic Product Manager.

I thought Louis St. Hilaire was still the Catholic Product Manager. Guess I missed the blog announcement about Andrew.

Bob Pritchett

A future release (some months out) will feature a new citation framework that will offer a huge number of styles. (Hopefully, all those you can use in Zotero.)

Sorry, can't give you a date yet!

Josh

A future release (some months out) will feature a new citation framework that will offer a huge number of styles. (Hopefully, all those you can use in Zotero.)

Sorry, can't give you a date yet!

I don't mind new formats, what bothers me is that most of the time Logos incorrectly cites my resources regardless of format. One of the biggest mistakes seems to be an extra space before colons. Also, many resources will not cite with page numbers, instead they cite with the verse reference. But wait, there is more! I often find that many of my dictionaries will not cite articles!! [+o(]

Fr Devin Roza

Bob, that's fantastic news! If we could use any Zotero compatible format that would make Logos all the more useful, and allow for users to develop their own styles or modify existing ones as needed (or just take advantage of the huge Zotero community to do so). Thanks.

JoshuaG, the extra space between colons may be due to the fact that it is typical in bibliographical references to distinguish between the "title" and "subtitle" of a work by separating them with a space-colon-space. Programs that know how to read the space-colon-space as title-subtitle can then apply different formatting to the title and the subtitle as required. The ideal thing, then, would be for Logos to know how to apply the "title" and "subtitle" formatting according to each one of the available styles.

fgh

Guess I missed the blog announcement about Andrew.

Good for you, in one sense. The anti-Catholic forum posts that followed weren't pretty.

Thanks for linking. I hadn't seen the comments.

A future release (some months out) will feature a new citation framework that will offer a huge number of styles. (Hopefully, all those you can use in Zotero.)

Good news! I guess I could have saved Andrew that e-mail. [:)]

Fr Devin Roza

fgh, thanks for your heads up about the links. I had seen them, but appreciate it anyway. Andrew Jones is doing a great job, and I have been in contact with him.

Don't let the negative comments of some get you down - it's beautiful to see the huge number of positive comments as well. It's a great opportunity for all of us to build bridges and let the charity of Christ shine forth as we strive to dive deeper into God's Word. [;)]

Russ White

Kudos for supporting Zotero --I use this in all my work at Seminary, and have been trying to get more people to use it, as well.

But I might be a little confused --why wouldn't you just use the bibtex format to get cites out of Logos and into Zotero? There might be some reason to use some other format than bibtex that I don't know about --and if so, I'd like to switch...

The one cite I want as a possible default is a url into Logos, so that when I'm building a set of notes of resources for a paper, I can copy out the quotes I need and have the ref point back to logos by default. It'd make finding the resources later a lot easier.

:-)

Russ

Rosie Perera

The one cite I want as a possible default is a url into Logos, so that when I'm building a set of notes of resources for a paper, I can copy out the quotes I need and have the ref point back to logos by default. It'd make finding the resources later a lot easier.

Good news. You CAN do that in Logos! Just use Copy location as URL from the panel menu of the resource in question:

Be sure to scroll the resource so the exact location you want the URL to point to is up at the top of the window before choosing this command. Best way to get there if it's a chapter or article in a journal is click on the entry in the TOC that will get you directly to the start of that section.

Fr Devin Roza

But I might be a little confused --why wouldn't you just use the bibtex format to get cites out of Logos and into Zotero? There might be some reason to use some other format than bibtex that I don't know about --and if so, I'd like to switch...

The advantage would just be that since Logos can automatically create the footnote for you when you copy and paste a quote, including the page numbers and everything, you could save quite a bit of work if you are citing a lot of resources that you have in your Logos collection.

The bibtex to Zotero option is another good one as well, just in some cases it will imply more work (although, in other cases exporting the biblex to Zotero first and then citing from Zotero could actually imply less work long term, as it would allow Zotero to automatically update your citations in the case that you modify the citation format or the bibliographical data!).

Russ White

Good news. You CAN do that in Logos! Just use Copy location as URL from the panel menu of the resource in question:

I know you can do this (take a look at the entire section on cross linking Logos with OneNote on my blog) --but what I want is for the URL to be a cite type, so I can have the URL copied when I copy the text --like the Turabian footnote is today. This is a workflow thing --to copy a piece of text out today, I must copy the text, paste it, then go back, click on the triangle, select 'copy location as URL,' then switch back to my note software, and paste again.

That's why I asked for it as a default cite type, rather than just having the capability in general.

Russ White

The advantage would just be that since Logos can automatically create the footnote for you when you copy and paste a quote, including the page numbers and everything, you could save quite a bit of work if you are citing a lot of resources that you have in your Logos collection.

Yes, of course --but if you're using Zotero, you're not pasting cites directly into your document (or presentation). Instead, you're building a Zotero entry for each one. What I'm trying to figure out is if there's an advantage to using some format other than BibTex when pulling cites from Logos into Zotero, not why you would want to pull from Logos in a specific cite format for direct pasting into a document.

fgh

A future release (some months out) will feature a new citation framework that will offer a huge number of styles. (Hopefully, all those you can use in Zotero.)

What would also be very useful to me would be to be able to set the Bible citation separately. I very seldom want anything more than the actual reference, and the few times I do, I just want a simple (Bibel -82) or similar after that reference. Having to remove more than one line of bibliographic data every single time I quote the Bible -- which is, after all, what I quote most often -- is beginning to get rather annoying.