CSL's "position" and MS Word "section breaks"

tillheilmann

Is it possible to reset CSL's "position" condition when a "section break" occurs within a MS Word document?

Explanation: I am preparing an edited volume with contributions by different authors (each in a separate MS Word "section"). Citations are of the form: "Name, Title, Address, Year" for the first reference to the item and "Name, Year" for subsequent ones. Some bibliographic entries are referenced by more than one author. However, I want to have a consolidated bibliography at the end of the book *and* I want recurring references to "restart" with each author, i.e. a citation of an entry already referenced by author N(1) should not be treated as "subsequent" when author N(2, 3, ...) first references it again.

adamsmith

it's currently not. IIRC this has been brought up before and turns out to be quite tricky because of how Word sets those section breaks, but @fbennett would remember that better.

tillheilmann

I thought about splitting the Word file into separate documents for each chapter and then merging them into one big file when I'm done editing them. However, this probably wouldn’t work (I guess, I haven't actually tried) because ambiguous author-year citations will not be disambiguated in the original separate files as the citations there do not "know" about the citations in the other files. Any ideas for a workaround? (A possibility--when working with a single big file--would be an option to manually force a "full" author-title citation the same way we can already exclude authors.)

fbennett

It would be a little tedious to set up, but if the individual chapters were given a bibliography that had all of the cites in the full document registered as uncited items, you should get proper disambiguation. Or just paste the full thesis text after the chapter you're rendering, and discard it after you've proofed and printed.

tillheilmann

Okay, how would I do that (i.e. register all references of the complete document as "uncited" items in the individual chapter files)?

fbennett

For that approach, you would have to insert them using the "Edit
bibliography" button in the word processor (hence "tedious"). Pasting
the full thesis text after the chapter you're printing would be
simpler, although it might be slower to refresh.

tillheilmann

Sorry: I never even noticed the "Edit bibliography" entry in Word's menu. I can see how it would be tedious to use that feature. The second approach, however, is clever, thanks! It will also be somewhat cumbersome, though, because the volume consists of 300+ pages, 30+ contributions, 1000+ cites and 400+ bibliographic items. My machine already needs up to 10 seconds to add/edit a reference.

fbennett

Yes. Large documents are a bottleneck. They can be sped up, but it will require attention from the developers. There's no short-term solution for that one.