[MLZ] How do you omit "a," "at," "in," "of," and "the" in the container-title?

wonblee

Bluebook Table 13 says "a," "at," "in," "of," and "the" should be omitted in the journal title.

Shouldn't "a ": "!here>>>" do the job? (I've tried, but it doesn't seem to work.) How do you build the rule into the abbreviation file?

fbennett

This will need additional logic in the processor. Abbreviations could possibly handle these, but you would need to set the proper abbreviation for every variant of the journal title. It would be a little like whack-a-mole.

A separate stop-list for removing words, coded in the style directly, will be more transparent. I'll put this on the todo list.

(Edited for grammar)

wonblee

I agree that additional logic in the processor is the way to go. The best I could come up with is to replace these stopping words with the unicode escaping character \u200B, which is the zero-width space, in the abbreviation filter like below.

"of": "\u200B"

The problem with this method is that it will leave an extra space right behind the zero-width space, because you can only get rid of "of", but not "of ". (The extra space behind the non-width space becomes noticeable if you use a mono-width font like courier or consolas.