Dear readers, I’m writing a script that generates a Table of Authorities from a Pages document and I need your help. I’ve determined 2 ways to delimit a citation for inclusion in the Table and I’m interested in your thoughts on how to implement this all-important feature.
First, the user could highlight the citation, then select the type of citation (case or statute) from a dialog box. Microsoft Word for Windows uses this method. I don’t particularly like this method, but it’s familiar to many switchers.
The second way is to delimit the citations using a markup language. For example, one might use something like \case{A v. B., 123 U.S. 456 (2008)} within their text to delimit the case citation. With my background in LaTeX and HTML, I prefer this method as it’s easier to parse the document. Moreover, the user would not have to go back and highlight each citation, hoping not to miss a citation. Instead, the user would simply delimit the cases as he or she types.
Here’s a quick movie of what I have so far. I’d love to get your feedback on how you might delimit the citations. Thanks!
Kevin Morton on July 8th, 2008 at 15:38 says:
So if I’m understanding this correctly, you would type case{ before the case and close it with a “}”? I wonder if there’s a way for textexpander to do that? I prefer the second method. Looks promising!
statonjr on July 8th, 2008 at 15:42 says:
@Kevin -
That’s correct. You would type \case{ before the citation and close it with another }. For statutes, you would use \statute{}.
And yes, TextExpander can do this.
Thanks for your feedback!
Brock Benjamin on July 8th, 2008 at 22:03 says:
The second way. I use the first way in Word and miss (forget) to mark cites all the time. Would be nice to be able to simply mark them while you type.
Grace Suarez on July 9th, 2008 at 13:34 says:
I like your way better than the “Word way.” Yes, it would take some getting used to, but it would also mean not having to go back and hope to get all the cites right. I offer myself as a guinea pig (appellate lawyer — I do tables all the time).
Martin Michel on August 16th, 2008 at 13:45 says:
I really like this kind of office automation and have also written myriads of such scripts for my former employer, an electroplating company.
There we used RagTime, an unique office suite that features unrivaled AppleScript support. You can script and automate almost every aspect of your document and mix several components into one layout: spreadsheets, graphs, images, drawings, texts, etc. I know that I sound like a sales agent, but I just love this software and its scriptability.
For example, I created RagTime workflows that directly converted the written letter to PDF and send it out to the customer via eMail, auto-filing the document into the correct customer folder included.
Or you could push a button in a RagTime document (yes, you can have buttons in RagTime documents) and the whole layout was changed to a different language. For an export-oriented company, that was quite convenient.
Therefor I think that RagTime might also be quite useful for lawyers. If you are looking for an office suite with versatile scripting suite, I recommend it. Unfortunately RagTime is far from being cheap
I also created a free calendar template for RagTime (mac) that you can download at MacScripter:
http://bbs.macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=25262
Happy Scripting