Manual selection of singular/plural locator

fbennett

In some styles, pinpoint references (the string entered for the locator in the WinWord/OO GUI) must be very precise. This can lead to cites like the following:

John Doe, Bogus Book 345 nn. 1-3 (2000)
... or ...
Law of Property Act 1925 sec. 27(a)-(c)

In the current design, both of these pinpoint strings ("345 nn. 1-3" and "27(a)-(c)") will be reported to the client formatter as plural, which may be incorrect (depending on the requirements of the style), and for legal citation, at least (i.e. the dreaded Bluebook) this is pretty much a show stopper.

It seems to me that it's just not possible to automate the correct interpretation of the semantics in these strings, and that in large or in small it's going to be a persistent nuisance. So I'm wondering (hoping, actually) that users can be given a simple singular/auto/plural radio button in the WinWord/OO GUI, so that they can force a given instance of the citation to the appropriate value.

What are the chances of getting this facility in there?

fbennett

As a follow-on to this, I wonder whether a CSL-based facility for remapping the labels (for editor, translator, the various locators, etc.) within a style file is possible. This would greatly simplify the fine-tuning of styles that diverge in small ways from the mainstream practices of APA and Chicago. The way things work at the moment, with all label strings delivered verbatim out of zotero, minor exceptions are awkward at best, and if a desired singular/plural label pair cannot be found among the various combinations produced by zotero, it looks like you're basically stuck.

An override environment for placement in the CSL header would be great. I know zilch about XML and the like, but maybe something roughly like this?

<label-maps>
<label-map variable="editor">
<label-item type="short" singular="edcritter" plural="edcritters"/>
<label-item type="verb" singular="mangled by" plural="mangled by"/>
</label-map>
</label-maps>

Rintze

I too have been looking into the ability to redefine terms. I wrote a style with some custom terms (check out the terms element in http://www.zotero.org/styles/mhra_note_without_bibliography/dev). The only caveat is that this style doesn't play nice with Zotero 1.0.7. A bug has recently been squashed, and custom terms should work okay in the upcoming 1.0.8 release. But you can already take a look at how to implement them. Note that custom terms are always locale-specific (with xml:lang="en" referring to the English terms).

fbennett

Nice! I didn't realize that custom terms were possible. But would it be correct that customized plural-sensitive terms are not yet supported? Or am I missing something (again)?

Rintze

Can you give an example, as I'm not sure what you define as a customized plural-sensitive term? Do you mean things like 'p' and 'pp' to indicate pages? Those are all locale-specific strings, and are handled in the same way as other terms.

fbennett

It does work, I've just figured out the CSL syntax (hurray!).

The problem is that the unique term identifier ("editor", "translator") sometimes needs to map through to a singular or to a plural version in each of the formats being defined ("verb", "short", "long", etc.) ... and as I kinda expected when I saw your code, there is an extension in the syntax that makes this possible. It took a bit of trial and error to figure out how the RELAX NG spec maps through to the actual tags and attributes, but (for the benefit of people like myself who can't read the syntax specification) here's my example above, in a form that validates under CSL:
<terms>
<locale xml:lang="en">
<term name="editor" form="short">
<single>edcritter</single>
<multiple>edcritters</multiple>
</term>
<term name="editor" form="verb">mangled by</term>
</locale>
</terms>

This removes a load of worry for the style I'm (slowly) working on. Thanks, Rintze!

Rintze

This file may also come in handy, as it specifies all the default terms that can be called in a CSL style:

https://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbiblio/csl/locales/locales-en-US.xml

fbennett

Exactly what the doctor ordered. Thanks again.