Re: ibidem

["Mark D. Szuchman" <szuchman>]

Fritz,
Help me understand more clearly your objective: what do you mean by a
"heading for a page of notes"?  If my guess is right, you want to go to
create a new document (intended eventually for your notes on a given
work), go to Ibidem, find the bibliographic work, click on cite, have
the bibliographic item appear at the start of your document, and then
sail on to type your notes.  

This is achievable, but it appears to me to be setting yourself up for
more trouble down the line of your efforts than it's worth.  First, you
can list the item as a bibliographic rather than a foot/endnote item
and get rid of the head word, such as "Bibliography" or "Works Cited."
That's not a problem: all you do in Ibidem is find your item, cite, set
new (just for the sake of argument), choose Chicago Manual of Style
(Bibliographic) -- for this example (I'm a CMS kind of a guy, anyway)
-- the in the Insert/Edit dialogue click Reference only, then OK.

This will place the title of the work in the CMS bibliographic style A
(if you chose A rather than B).  In NBW, click the update icon.  The
text of the bibliographic reference, including the word "Bibliography"
will be in blue, meaning it's program-entered and not user-modifiable. 
Click on the word Bibliography, click the right mouse, left click on
the selection Dynamic On/Off. Delete all the characters in the word
Bibliography.  Right click again, and left click again on Dynamic
On/Off to make the remaining text blue again.

You can now place your cursor below the reference and type your notes. 
BUT, the key to all automation in NB -- D or W -- is this matter called
style, which you would have now set for the document and would have to
change again for the text you will be typing in order to conform to the
different needs of your layout. Beyond this, the considerable
complexity involving all the elements of the bibliographic style
(layout), _preceding_ the relative simplicity of note-taking is an
inversion of the norm;  i.e., the critical apparatus, including
foot/endnotes and bibliography as backmatter. Finally, assuming that
you may well be working in the future with these note files (a
reasonable assumption) and that, as notes, you will definitely want to
index them as part of the Orbis apparatus, these syle issues will haunt
you as you use Orbis for citing into the research or lecture documents
you will be working on tomorrow, making use of the materials that you
enter today.

I would prefer to enter the bibliographic item into Ibidem in the
normal way -- or let Bookwhere 2000 do it for me, plus my own keywords
drawn from my own authority list.  I would then create a document for
my notes and the heading would be the result of my copying and pasting
from Ibidem to my new document.  This can be done in seconds,
italicizing, underlining, or placing quotation marks -- as needed -- is
a matter of seconds. I would type (or dictate) my notes. I would save
the file with an extension that will be automatically indexed next time
I call on Orbis and voila! no Ibidem ghosts or stylistc albatrosses to
haunt me in the future. 

I confess that my motivation in much of this activity is loosely
borrowed from the 1920s New York vaudeville standup comic act, the
punch line of which is: "Mister, if it makes you, vhy do you do it."
Mark
On Mon, 27 Dec 1999 11:32:50 -0600 (CST), Fred J. Levy wrote:

>Colleagues:
>
>I've been trying to use ibidem to generate a "heading" for a page of notes.
>The idea is to enter the bibliographical information once, in ibidem, and
>then use that program to produce the title for my reading notes.  All I've
>been able to accomplish thus far is to get a footnote (complete with number)
>or a bibliographical item (complete with heading, "Bibliography").  Is there
>any way to do this without the trappings?  It would save time, and act as a
>useful check on my entry of the information into Ibidem.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Fritz
>
>
>