endash instead of hyphen in collapsed numeric citations

Maxim.Nazarenko

Right now collapsed citations seem to use hyphens: [1-21,24], for example. Is it possible to use endash instead? If there is some kind of limitation (i.e. hyphen is hard-coded), then what library/file/etc should I hack?

fbennett

Thanks for this report. It was agreed in the CSL group that it should be en-dash. I'll be making a fresh release of the processor soon, and will address this there.

Maxim.Nazarenko

So it is hard-coded :( Any plans to change that?

Maxim.Nazarenko

I forget to mention: I use Word for Win32 plugin (Word 2007 is 32bit, WIndows is 64bit).

fbennett

There has been talk of it, but no action so far. Is there an immediate reason why it should be made configurable? Certainly one use case will be for styles centered in an Asian language, which might use a completely different character (such as ～) to indicate a range; but we've only begun to dig into multilingual needs at that level in CSL development.

Maxim.Nazarenko

"In 99,99% of cases a hard-coded value is a bad idea". Hyphen and dashes typography tends to be complicated (dash length, space width, etc), so more flexible a style is the better, especially if we consider i18n/L10n.
One realistic use case is Russian language: traditionally there is only one type of dash, which is usually considered to be emdash.
A less realistic example is .. delimeter, so citations look like (1..21). I saw this style used at least once, but I have no clue if there is a formal standard.

fbennett

Thanks for the response. This is the kind of feedback we need. We do listen, but things don't get extended if YAGNI.