Widows and Orphans

EndNote EndNote General
1

My problem is this; I want to have a citiation in a bobliography of the following form:

Author, Title. Journal, Year|.　Volume|(Issue)|:　p.　Pages|.  <new line>

URL

That works, sort of, but EN only gives you a limited number of formatting options in the custom style editor.  If I press on the “Insert Field” drop down I have a choice of inserting a paragraph mark, which forces the URL to the next line but then EN thinks it can split my citation at that point so sometimes my citation appears on one page, and the URL at the top of the next page.  I would like to keep the lines together since most citations are only 3-4 lines at most.

Attempt two was to get rid of the paragraph marker and insert some forced separation marks.  However I now get strange “kerning” on the line before the URL because EN tries to justify both margins and if there are too few words on the line the spacing looks really strange.

So I went back to solution 1, which still gives me orphans on some pages and, because I inserted the end of paragraph marker, it does not apply the hanging indent to the URL.  I can fix that in the template by inserting a number of spaces before the URL, but that seems clunky because if I every change my document formatting I will have to go back and change the number of leading spaces in the template.  That seems excessively messy.

Anybody have a solution to this?  A happy bibliography would look like this (minus the orphan and hanging indent problem)


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2

What output style are you using? Have you tried to manually enter a “hard return” (SHIFT+ENTER) in the EndNote bibliography (Journal Article) template at the end of the last field and just before the URL field? (A forced separation may need to precede the hard return.)The hard return should shift the URL to the next line without adding an additional blank line or affecting the hanging indent.

3

Yes, I have tried that.  A “Shift-Enter” adds a paragraph marker and not a hard line return, hence my issue (inserting a forced separator give the same result).  EN is a citation manager and not a word processor so I am sure that it lacks some of the advanced controls present in MS Word, but I was hoping somebody had a work around.  Maybe EN needs to add a hard line return to the formatting options under the style editor.

As for the style I am using, it is a customized style that is a tweak of one of the standard styles EN provides.  I have used it for so long that I forget what the original style was.  This has only come up recently because somebody asked me to include the PubMed links in the citation.

4

This contains some Word Power User options. Don’t get scared off though.

Force separations aren’t the same as non-breaking space, and there is no way, to my knowledge - to insert a line break, which would be distinct from a paragraph return in endnote.  Maybe one or both of those have been added and I missed them, but they aren’t listed in the insert field dropdown with other punctuation and characters.  

The best option is to insert a tab in front of the URL after the paragraph break, but it won’t fix the orphan problem.  

Not sure why - but I created this version (where there is a paragraph return at the end after pages,  and a tab inserted in front of the URL).  

 Author (Year). Title. Journal| Volume|, Pages|.<paragraph return>

 <tab>URL|

  

But I can’t then get rid of the extra line break when there isn’t a URL, even if I put it in before the separation character. :confounded:  Maybe we just need to play around a bit more with the templates.

As an alternative, I suggest that you not use a paragraph return prior to the URL, and turn off justification in your document.  I recommend all my students to use left alignment, as justification does make it harder for the reader in a long typescript document anyway (ragged right ends make it easier for the eye to keep its place in the document for some reason). and then the kerning won’t be a problem when the URL is moved to the next line due to length.   

So that would look like this (don’t forget to keep the “link adjacent spaces” when inside the "pipes |)

 Author (Year). Title. Journal| Volume|, Pages|. URL| 

I was doing this in EndnoteX7, which has a -as far as I can tell, new undocumented useful feature, which add an “Endnote Bibliography” style in the Word styles list.  This acquires somewhat eclectic attributes, but can be modified to “keep lines together”, for example, so the paragraph won’t break, although there is no way to prevent the URL from ending up on the top, by itself - unless there is no line break before the URL.  At the same time, burn off the Widows/Orphan setting (which I do anyway in my normal.dotx! Never liked that setting!) 

One final way, is to use the para return tab and just before submiting search and replace them ^p^t with ^L and make sure the keep lines together option in applied to the paragraphs in the bibliography.  You probably want to turn off CYWY, so endnote won’t automatically revamp the bibliography.  This avoids needing to remove field codes. 

5

I think the solution is to wait for X7 and try out the new undocumented style feature.  I don’t want my citation manager to dictate how I justify my document, and I have way too many documents that link to this same style that I don’t want to screw up.  When you play around too much with complex documents that were written in the older .doc format instead of the newer .docx then you are asking for trouble, and this is likely to induce a stream of invective not suitable for ladies or children to hear.

Although I didn’t mention it above, I have played about with inserting a tab into the bibliography specification.  It improved some things but made others worse.  I suspect I am going to have to live with the minor inconvenience until I can try out the X7 version as none of the medicines you presribe are less painful than the disease for my application (but at least I don’t have to use Reference Manager any more:stuck_out_tongue:).

6

Justification is based on the normal style of the Word document and not the endnote output style, in any case?  That won’t change with X7, just it gives you a specific word style to easily adjust.  

7

Leanne, I will respectfully disagree with your last posting.  Now that X7 has a new style dedicated to the bibliography, you can set the justifcation options for the biblio style to be different than the normal style in my Word document.  That doesn’t address the problem with the hard line feed vs paragraph marker, but it is an improvement.

8

Sorry, I wasn’t being clear.  You are correct.

I wasn’t meaning the new Word template style that Endnote creates,  but it grabs the attributes it uses from the Word template style somehow.  

The Endnote output style (the .ens style file) itself doesn’t have a place to specify that the paragraph should be justified or left aligned.   

9

And I FINALLY got it to behave as I want.  The trick is not to insert the paragraph marker or tab at the end of the line, but rather the vertical “forced separation” marker, a whole bunch of spaces (I added something like 50), another forced separation marker, and finally insert the URL field.  When MS Word processes this it forces the URL all by itself to the next line (without inserting a blank line between the URL and the rest of the citation) and it apparently ignores the extra spaces between the separation markers because I don’t see evidence of leading or trailing spaces in the rest of my text.

In the bibliography style I have widow/orphan, keep lines together, and keep with next toggled on.  This split a four line citation at a page break with two lines above the break, and one line (plus the URL line) below the break.

1 Like
10

Now where is the “like” button here!?  – I did award Kudos…   You can award your own post a “solved” checkmark though!