I’m new to Fidus Writer so forgive me if there is an obvious answer to this question.
When I add my sources to the “Bibliography” tab, I’ve been using the little menu bar that appears under text in the “Title” field to italicize book and journal titles. While this italicizes text on the bibliography form itself, the italics do not carry over to the actual document or the print view that I see when I press Ctrl+P.
Am I doing something wrong or is there a solution to this problem? Thanks very much!
Hey @evans,
ultimately it is the citation style that decides how the bibliography will be rendered. Some may not allow styling at all, and so in those cases it will not show. Also, if you add bold/italic it will “flip-flop” - meaning that if the title should be italicized according to the citation style and you have marked a word inside of that title as italicized, then it will instead remove the italicized formatting from that word.
Note that this feature is not meant to italicize/underline/bolden the entire title of all bibliography entries. It’s meant for the very rare cases in which the title itself contains styling. This will happen in maybe 1 of a million cases where you have a book title such as the travel guide “Lₒndₒn”, “A cultural dictionary of PUNK” (where “PUNK” is underlined), “The FAT people”, etc. .
If you simply want all your titles to be italicized, then remove all the styling of the titles and instead pick a citation style that underlines/italicizes the parts that you want styled that way.
Hi @johanneswilm - thanks very much for this answer, which makes a lot of sense! The citation style I’m using is the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (full note, with Ibid), which does use italics for titles. I went through my Bibliography and removed all the italics from the “title” fields to avoid the ‘flip flop’, but this doesn’t seem to make a difference to what shows up in the document. The titles remain unitalicized, even in the Ctrl+P view.
I deleted a few endnotes from the document and re-added the newly edited entries from my Bibliography, hoping that they just needed to be ‘refreshed.’ However, this also didn’t change anything.
The only way that I was able to get italics in the titles (in Ctrl+P view) was by creating totally new bibliography entries from scratch.
In your experience, is this what is supposed to happen? I’m dreading the thought of inputting all of those bibliographic entries all over again…
Hey @evans,
the way it currently works is that when you use a citation from the global bibliography manager into a document, it is copied into the document. If the citation subsequently is updated in the global bibliography manager, the citation in the document is not updated. So if you have used the citation in a document, what you need to do is enter the document, scroll down to the bibliography and click on those bibliography entries you want to update. You will get an editor in which you can make the change that will then only apply to that bibliography item in that document.
I do understand that in many situations it would be more convenient to update all citations in all documents that have cited the reference when it is updated in the global bibliography manager. We used to have it like that but had to change it when it turned out that that had other consequences that we had not considered - for example when users replaced an old edition with a new edition of a given work in their bibliography manager and that also made several documents change whereby page number references were incorrect.
In the future, we should probably have something more flexible - for example a dialog that opens when one enters the document after the bibliography entries have been changed asking something like “5 bibliography entries used in this document have been updated in the bibliography manager. Do you want the bibliography entries used in this document to be updated with the changes?”
Hi @johanneswilm - Aaah, I see. That makes sense and your solution worked perfectly. Italics are all behaving as they should now. Thanks for outlining that, as you saved me hours and hours of headache of deleting and re-entering bibliographic info from the “Bibliography” tab.
The idea of a dialog box that warns the user about changes in the bibliography is a great one but now that I know the secret to italics in the bibliography I’m perfectly happy for now.
Thank you for all your work on this lovely writer. It’s really nice to have a good looking document to edit and play with rather than the standard ugly word processing aesthetic.