Full manual of CSL

mirfan

Is there any full (detail) manual for the overview at
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#formatting

I am having some problem understanding the use of 'match' inside the conditionals. Is there any page with some examples on that?
I would appreciate any feedback.

adamsmith

no, that's the best manual we have. It's a wiki, though, so we're constantly trying to improve.

match is very simple - it's either match="any" or match="none"
remember that you can use "if" only to test for some select things, namely
- the presence of a variable
- the item type
- if a variable is numeric or not

mirfan

Thanks for your reply.
So, what does the following line really mean

<if type="chapter book" match="any">

Is this a test to see if any of the multiple citation entries is a book chapter? Or, does it mean something entirely different?

adamsmith

book and chapter are two item types.
What this line means is - test if the one item that csl is formatting (and it always goes one by one, all the if commands refer to just one item) - is either a "book" or a "book section" (the latter being "chapter" in csl).
So whatever follows will only be applied to books and and book sections.

mirfan

so, "match" is basically matching the left hand side of the equal sign following "if," with a list on the right hand side.
Is that right?
Thank you.

adamsmith

If I understand you correctly - yes.
You don't need a match command in all cases - e.g.
if type="book"
works without any match.

But then if you want to say - "if an item is not a book", you can do
if type="book" match="none"

or as in the example above, if something applies to a whole list of items you do
if type="book chapter article-journal" match="any"

mirfan

thanks for the clarification. I have a related issue.
I am trying to distinguish between two types of report: report and working paper. For working paper, I want to put some string in te "Extra" field. Now when I try:
<else-if type="report">
<choose>
<if variable="extra">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic"/>
</if>
<else>
<text variable="title" quotes="true"/>
</else>
</choose>
</else-if>

It won't work. I tried <if variable="extra" match="none"> then the else branch won't work!
Thank you.

adamsmith

"extra" is not the right name for the variable (it's not the name of any variable, which is why this doesn't work ;-)). Extra is mapped to "note" - that should work.
(the whole list of mappings is here:
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#variables )

mirfan

thanks many.
I have achieved all that I targeted, for now. One little thing, for conferences is there any way to add a conference end date. I put "2003/9/7" in the date field and get it as "September 7" in the right place. However, I would like to see "September 7-9"
Any way to do that, at this point.
Thanks again

adamsmith

nope, date ranges aren't supported atm.