Suppress period after citation when suffix ends with punctuation

jlm · July 11, 2012

I have a long OpenOffice document with nearly 300 citations, created with Zotero 2.0. A couple of dozen times in a note, I have something like this: Cf. Jones, A Book Title, 179: "Some interesting quotation, perhaps a rather long one."

"Cf. " is the prefix to the citation, and ":" is the suffix. The rest is normal text. Zotero 2.0 was smart enough to recognize that the suffix ended with punctuation, and so it didn't add a period to the end of the citation. Zotero 3.0 (I have 3.0.8) seems to have lost this ability, because it puts a period after the colon.

I'm now revising my document and including it in a new and still longer work. This involves using a different CSL style for the citations, which I'm creating.

What's the best way to get rid of the extra period? Is there something I can do in the Zotero preferences or in the CSL style to deal with this automatically? If not, the best workaround I know of it to put the first full sentence into the citation's suffix, so that the period Zotero insists on including can go somewhere where a period is needed. Does anyone have a better suggestion? Manually editing the citation would be acceptable for a smaller document with a shorter lifespan, but I need the citations to continue updating.

BTW, I am generally happy with the 3.0 upgrade. There are at least a dozen citations I had to edit with 2.0 that I can now revert to their default form, principally citations that erroneously used ibid. with 2.0.

adamsmith · July 11, 2012

This is the intended workaround:

to put the first full sentence into the citation's suffix, so that the period Zotero insists on including can go somewhere where a period is needed.

The idea is that for note-base styles - it looks like you're using Chicago Manual - you create all footnotes - even long ones - by inserting Zotero citations and using the prefix/suffix fields. Since (almost) all footnotes end with a period, that gets you there in 9 out of 10 cases.
Any other solution I've seen suggested has other downsides.

fbennett · July 11, 2012

It would probably be safe to remove the terminal period on a citation cluster automagically where the suffix consists only of a single punctuation character. I don't think that would cause collateral issues, but I'll pause a bit before implementing it, in case anyone spots a difficulty.