German Citation Style - CSL style generation/changes

nmschaller

Hello,

I'am a newbie to CSL. I would like to generate an own CSL, but I don't know where to start:
Reading the Citation Stylesheets I am barely getting the structure. Where does an individual Stylesheet start and the original CS language end?

1. Where does the language/location come from:

Take for example the German handling of editors' books: In the Harvard Reference format 7 (Author-Date) (de) (dev) the editor macro does obviously change a (German) "hrsg" - that must come from somewhere else, the CSL or the original Harvard style - to a "Hrsg." Where do these pieces of German come from? Why is it inconsistent like in access: Available at (English in original Harvard style) zugegriffen am (German in original Harvard style).

2. What is the structure of the Stylesheet:

I am getting that the variables come first and then what shall appear in the citation and bibliography at all. So far so good.

But how could I define that I would like additional fields in the bibliography if applicable like additional information on a tv broadcast or other media than books.
How could I define that the bibliography should not be partially in italics or " ". There is a else-if paragraph regarding the title in the Harvard 7-script but in the upper part. Could I just delete this paragraph?
To delete the ISBN No. in the bibliography, should I just delete the mentionning of ISBN in the bibliography part?

3. Editing an existing style or using a generator?

I have already tried the linked generator. But not knowing all the variables I broke this off. (The documentation didn't work.)

4. Doing it now or later?

When is CSL 1.0 expected to come? I would prefer to do the editing work just once.

Thanks a lot.

Nicole

ajlyon

CSL 1.0 is in the Zotero 2.1 betas. The betas are already stable enough for non-mission-critical use.

adamsmith

1. Zotero includes translation to a range of languages in the styles. They were provided through babelzilla, though Zotero has announced shifting to a simpler service.
They are called by "term" in the csl
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#terms
Inconsistencies usually develop because a style will not use a term, but instead but something like "Available at" into the suffix or prefix field of a variable and that, of course, isn't translated. The capitaliyation of terms - i.e. hrsg vs. Hrsg can be changed using the text-case attribute (i.e. text-case="lowercase" vs. text-case="capitalize-first")

2. That question is too general for a good answer. In general, you can use conditionals both in macros (i.e. the first part of the style) and in the citation/bibliography section. They allow you to provide different information for different item types etc.
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#conditionals
Quotation marks and italics are usually defined through such conditionals somewhere in the style, so if you want neither then yes, get rid of the relevant ones.

3. There is no generator that is anywhere close to a working condition - where did you see the link? Didn't that have a bold warning attached?
Though see the test panel described in the simple help here - especially in the beginning I wouldn't work without it.
http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits

4. What ajlyon says, and 1.0 has better documentation, though conversion of .8 styles is automatic, so you wouldn't have to do anything twice.

This info is for 0.8, but I think all of it applies to 1.0 as well - the test panel required manual refreshing in the beta version a while ago - not sure if that has been fixed, but shouldn't be a problem even if it hasn't.

nmschaller

Thank you, ajlyon and adamsmith. That helps me getting started.

The generator I tried was the Simple Style Generator at http://www.somwhere.org/csl/.

ajlyon

Note that the Simple Style Generator is never a good idea. It is known to produce invalid CSL, and the code it produces is inefficient and hard to maintain. The only good way to edit CSL at present is to work with the code directly, usually by modifying an existing style that comes close to what you need.

adamsmith

nmmschaller - yes, I figured you had used that one (and what ajlyon said about that is true) - I was wondering how you had found it. We have tried to attach a warning to any link that goes there from the Zotero page and I was curious if we had missed one.

nmschaller

Thanks, I'm going to try this.

I don't rememeber how I came to the Simple Style Generator, probably through Google search. But it definitely redirects to Zotero for documentation:
At http://www.somwhere.org/csl/ click on "Documentation" and arrive at http://www.somwhere.org/csl/ redirected to Zotero: dev/csl syntax summary (You are here: start » dev:start » dev:csl_syntax_summary ).