I have been trying out the demo version of Bookpedia and so far like what I see, but have some particular questions:
My original book catalogue was done in MS Access and then transferred to Filemaker Pro. To save repetitious typing, I have an Author list with a unique four-letter code for each author (eg FITZ for F Scott Fitzgerald), which I was then able to query in Access to give me a report which replaced the author code with the full name. I therefore now have two tables in Filemaker: authors and titles. Is there any way to amalgamate them into Bookpedia? I have found the tip to select a group and Command+E to edit the template, and can gradually go through them that way – but I wondered if there was a simpler way?
Secondly, when I print a book report I would prefer to have each author listed only once and then a list of his/her titles, so:
Author 1...Title 1
...............Title 2
...............Title 3
Author 2...Title 1
...............Title 2
(without the dots, which I have put in to try to make it line up) rather than repeating the author each time. Is this possible?
Thirdly, I cannot find any way to change the font (in particular the font size) in a printed report.
I am sure I will be back with more questions!
Bookpedia new user questions
I have to admit I don't quite understand the first question - you have a list of the unique four-letter author listing and the actual author listing and you want to merge them? Did you already import them into Bookpedia?
At the moment it's not possible in a template to list an author only once and then have a list of the titles but thanks for the idea. We'll see if we can make that happen somehow in the future.
The printing templates, just like the export templates, are fully customizable because they are built on HTML. To customize a printing template you have to ctrl-click the Bookpedia icon and choose 'Show package contents/Contents/Resources/Templates'. That folder contains all the HTML and printing templates, you'll find that the printing templates have 'Printing' in their name. Open your template with any good text editor, do your changes and then save the template in a new folder titled 'Templates' inside your home folder under ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia. For any images, you have to create a folder inside 'Templates' named 'Images'.
The reason you have to save the template outside of the application now is that any templates inside the application get overwritten every time you update the program.
To find out more about customizing templates, take a look at the Help file under 'Exporting/Customizing templates' or if you don't have any HTML experience, let me know which printing template it is you want to change and what the changes are and we can do it for you.
At the moment it's not possible in a template to list an author only once and then have a list of the titles but thanks for the idea. We'll see if we can make that happen somehow in the future.
The printing templates, just like the export templates, are fully customizable because they are built on HTML. To customize a printing template you have to ctrl-click the Bookpedia icon and choose 'Show package contents/Contents/Resources/Templates'. That folder contains all the HTML and printing templates, you'll find that the printing templates have 'Printing' in their name. Open your template with any good text editor, do your changes and then save the template in a new folder titled 'Templates' inside your home folder under ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia. For any images, you have to create a folder inside 'Templates' named 'Images'.
The reason you have to save the template outside of the application now is that any templates inside the application get overwritten every time you update the program.
To find out more about customizing templates, take a look at the Help file under 'Exporting/Customizing templates' or if you don't have any HTML experience, let me know which printing template it is you want to change and what the changes are and we can do it for you.
I have a table with fields of Author ID, Surname and Firstname and have previously used an Expression to turn Author ID into Surname and Firstname before printing. I have tried doing this within Bookpedia, although I have only imported a sample file so far, not my full catalogue yet. It isn't a major problem: I can either select a group within BP and edit the template, author by author or do a search and replace in a text editor before I import them finally. After all, I will only have to do it once.I have to admit I don't quite understand the first question - you have a list of the unique four-letter author listing and the actual author listing and you want to merge them? Did you already import them into Bookpedia?
It's very useful<g>. Since I'm now a fully paid up user I'll keep my fingers crossed.At the moment it's not possible in a template to list an author only once and then have a list of the titles but thanks for the idea. We'll see if we can make that happen somehow in the future.
<snip description of customising printing templates>
Thank you - I hadn't fully appreciated that you print from the browser, and have now succeeded in tweaking a template as I want it. I am very familiar with HTML but much appreciate the very kind offer to do it for me.
Thank you very much for responding.