Conditional text formatting -- APA 6th edition symposium presentations

bwiernik

APA 6th edition formatting for symposium presentations is highly annoying. Whereas all other presentations use the term "presented at", symposium presentations use "conducted at". To be clear, the style manual specifies:

Symposium:
Contributor. A. A., Contributor. B. B., Contributor, C. C., & Contributor, D. D. (Year, Month). Title of contribution. In E. E. Chairperson (Chair), Title of symposium. Symposium conducted at the meeting of Organization Name, Location.

Paper presentation or poster session:
Presenter, A. A. (Year, Month). Title of paper or poster. Paper or poster session presented at the meeting of Organization Name, Location.


Is there a way to get CSL to recognize the value of a variable and adjust the formatting accordingly (ala <if> <genre="symposium"> </if>) or is it only possible to test for existence of a value and whether it is numeric?

At present, I've implemented this conditional formatting in two different ways.
1. Put symposium presentations under 'Conference Paper' and posters/papers under 'Presentation' and simply change the formatting for these two types.

2. Put both kinds of presentations under 'Conference Paper' and use a different field (e.g. Call Number or Extra) as a dummy variable to cue change of formatting. For example, I might decide to only use the Extra field on 'Conference Paper' items as a flag to indicate that the item is a symposium. Then, if Extra has a value, the "conducted at" formatting is used. Otherwise, the standard "presented at" is used.

Is there a more elegant way to do this type of filtering?

adamsmith

Is there a way to get CSL to recognize the value of a variable and adjust the formatting accordingly (ala ) or is it only possible to test for existence of a value and whether it is numeric?

the latter. You're not able to test for content of a variable and likely won't be in the future.
Your workarounds (and similar wonkish approaches) are the only solutions I can think of as well.

arnprince

Well, I just downloaded Zotero, and I find that issues with APA formatting that were posted back in 2007 are still not working correctly - simple things such as only capitalizing the first word in a journal article title. I can't be bothered with software that can't be kept up to date better than this. So, I am just going to uninstall the whole lot from my computer and move on to the next free software. Good luck to you who wish to endure the incompetence.

ajlyon

In case you're still around, the capitalization is something completely customizable; you're probably seeing the automatic title-casing that is applied on import in some cases. Zotero cannot, and no software in the market really can, automatically convert from title case to sentence case reliably.

bwiernik

I'm sorry that you don't find Zotero meets your needs well. In all honesty, the citation formatting features of Zotero are the least of my concerns. I chose this software amongst all the others because of its excellent organizational and sharing functions. With respect to your specific issue of capitalizing titles--I am actually very glad for the way that Zotero works (as opposed to Endnote or others). With Zotero, I know that all capitalized words will remain so in citations, allowing me to specify which are proper nouns and which are not. With every other software I've tried, I would occasionally find people's names or the names of tests to be incorrectly made lowercase.

dstillman

It's unfortunate that behavior like arnprince's ends up being an effective strategy for getting tech support, but so it goes.

arnprince, if you do decide to stick around, please read Be Civil before posting here again. It includes some pointers (such as "maybe you just didn't discover the best way to perform a task") that you might find instructive before hurling insults at the people, most of them volunteers, who've spent thousands of hours over the years ensuring that Zotero formats styles correctly and who provide free, immediate tech support here. If you want help, start a new thread (instead of hijacking someone else's unrelated thread, as you've done here), ask a question politely, and you'll get an answer.

If you don't return, then perhaps this thread can at least serve as a warning for whatever unlucky software project you move on to next.

Rintze

It's unfortunate that behavior like arnprince's ends up being an effective strategy for getting tech support, but so it goes.

I agree that we tend to waste way too much times on trolls. Perhaps we should all limit ourselves to posting a link to http://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines#be_civil and leave it at that? Most of the support comes from a handful of people, so it should be relatively easy to condition ourselves to this :).

bwiernik

While that solution might be gratifying, such practices tend to make online forums feel unwelcome and uninviting in my experience.

Rintze

We don't get that many trolls. Probably less than 1% of the users asking for help. But I fully agree with Dan that we shouldn't reward those who spew around insults, threats, and generalizations.