FAQ

Q: What exactly does TextCite do?
A: TextCite is a program for storing, finding and exporting textual citations from publications. It is a high-tech version of the paper notecards that people have used for ages to store and organize important quotes from the books and other publications they have to read and later cite. This makes TextCite primarily a tool for people working in academia, where publishing a paper or a book often means having read and extracted citations from perhaps hundreds of individual publications.

Q: Why should I use TextCite, when I already use EndNote (or BibTeX, RefWorks, Sente, Bookends, etc.)
A: TextCite is especially designed to provide capabilities that these programs lack, or support poorly. In particular, bibliographic management programs are designed to handle references to entire publications (books, articles, chapters in edited books, etc.). They lack, however, advanced facilities for working with textual citations from those publications. Some bibliographic managers will allow you to store text snippets, but TextCite's entire design is focused around storing, finding, commenting and exporting textual citations in precisely the ways that you need for writing academic publications.

Q: How do I configure TextCite to work with my preferred Bibliography Manager?
A: When you create a record for a publication in TextCite, you have the option of entering a bibliographic code. Most bibliography managers assign a unique code to each publication record; you need to identify this code, and copy it to this "Bibliography Code" field in the TextCite publication record. Note that the publication record in TextCite has the character of a "stub"; TextCite is not intended to be a complete bibliography manager; instead, it uses the bibliographic codes assigned by your bibliography manager, and when you copy and paste Citations from TextCite into your word/text processor, Textcite will copy this code so that your bibliography manager can recognize the citation and format the footnote or bibliography entry correctly.

Q: How can I create a new Category without leaving the citation editor?
A: Click the button to add a category to the Citation. Expand the Category tree and locate the parent of the Category you want to add. Right click and choose "Add Category," just as you would from the main window. Once the Category has been added, you can select it and add it to the Citation.

Q: How can I open a backup file? The file chooser won't let me select them.
A: In the file chooser, change the file filter type from "CiteBook (.cb)" to "CiteBook Backup (.bcb)".

Q: The Filter Bar doesn't filter by categories. How can I limit the visible Citations to a particular Category?
A: In the "Outlook Bar" on the left, click on the "Categories" tab at the bottom of the screen. In the Category Tree that appears, locate the Category you want to filter by and click on it. The Citations will be filtered according to your selection.

Q: I've encountered a bug. What do I do?
A: In the Help menu of TextCite, there are several menu items you can use to access support facilities. Choose the one that says "Report Bug," and you will be taken to the Sourceforge bug reporting application. There, you can create a bug report, attaching the Citebook that is causing trouble, along with the textcite.log logfile found in your home directory.