Removing punctuation in certain circumstances

tipichris

I've come across an odd requirement in a style guide - at least it seems odd to me - and am struggling to find a neat way to implement it without having completely different sections for online and print versions of the same type of sources.

Online versions include the phrase "[online]" immediately after the title or container title, and separated from it by a space. That's easy enough. But the [online] tag must never be followed by a full stop. This is the case even if the title in a print source is.

So a print book is

Dudley, P. R. (2001) Wavelets in Computing: An Efficient Means of Conducting Research. 2nd edn.
Oxford: Oxford University Press

But an online book is

Potter, H. (2005) An Introduction to Human Anatomy [online] 4th edn. London: Adam Arnold. available
from <http://anatomy/introduction/human/htm>; [27 March 2006]

There are several other situations where this occurs in the style guide and when I questioned it I was told that the logic is that [online] is never followed by a full stop. Is there a simple way of implementing this, or am I stuck with some extensive rewriting and tortuous logic?

adamsmith

there's nothing super elegant. What I'd do is to include the period as part of the title macro, i.e. you'd have something like

<choose>
<if variable="URL">
<group delimiter=" ">
<text variable="title/>
<text term="online" prefix="[" suffix="]"/>
</group>
</if>
<else>
<text variable="title" suffix="."/>
</else>
</choose>

Obviously the whole thing becomes more complicated as you need different formatting for titles (italics, quotes, etc.), but that's the general idea.

tipichris

Thanks. It did indeed get more complicated than that, largely because though [online] is never followed by a period, it is not the case that the title always is. But your suggestion formed the basis of something that seems to have worked.