Suppresion of commas for titles ending in question marks

nathan.lamontagne · January 5, 2012

The last time this topic was discussed in the forums was two years ago, so I thought I would bring it up again.

I am getting citations from Zotero that look like this:
R. De Hoop, “Judges 5 Reconsidered: Which Tribes? What Land? Whose Song?,” in The Land of Israel in Bible, History and Theology (ed. J van Ruiten and J. C. de Vos; VTSup; Leiden, 2009) 151-66.

There should not be a comma after the question mark. Two years ago there was talk that the new CSL engine would automatically fix that, but I'm not sure that it did- I am using a CSL 1.0; zotero 2.1.10, and MS word 2003.

Is the problem mine, my style, or the programming? Is there a fix that isn't "Find and Replace"?

Thanks for the help.

fbennett · January 5, 2012

Probably the programming, I'll take a look soon. One general question before I start: what should happen in styles that put punctuation outside quotes? Should it then appear like this?

R. De Hoop, “Judges 5 Reconsidered: Which Tribes? What Land? Whose Song?”, in The Land of Israel in Bible, History and Theology (ed. J van Ruiten and J. C. de Vos; VTSup; Leiden, 2009) 151-66.

Or like this?

R. De Hoop, “Judges 5 Reconsidered: Which Tribes? What Land? Whose Song?” in The Land of Israel in Bible, History and Theology (ed. J van Ruiten and J. C. de Vos; VTSup; Leiden, 2009) 151-66.

(Presumably the question mark itself should not be pulled outside the quotes in this case, although it is a punctuation mark.)

Once I have the exact behavior pinned down, I'll build some tests and get this fixed.

adamsmith · January 5, 2012

We would also want to make sure that (shudder) this is the same across locales. I could very well see the comma being possible e.g. in BE, where it's outside the quotation marks, but not in AE, where it would be inside the quotations and thus right after the question mark.

nathan.lamontagne · January 6, 2012

To be honest, I don't know how it ought to appear for styles with commas outside quotation. I am working with Chicago, and several substyles of Chicago, which only states that the ? takes the place of the comma.