AGLC export

swisskit

Hi,

I must be doing something very wrong. I have been struggling for days to get the AGLC export to Biblatex and then the aglc.cls format to work properly.

My workflow is Zotero to biblatex using the Australian Guide to Legal Citation export, use the generated citekeys in a Markdown document, then convert to latex style pdf using Pandoc-citeproc.

I just cannot get the aglc.csl file to work properly

For example I specify a 'case' in Zotero and it changes to 'jurisdiction' in Biblatex. When I run it through Pandoc with aglc.csl it treats it as a journal entry and only looks at title, which it puts in title case. I try manually changing the biblatex file so that 'jurisdiction' becomes 'legal_case' but the processor fails. I try changing the biblatex file so that 'jurisdiction' becomes 'case' but the result is just the same as when it was 'jurisdiction'.

Can someone provide a step by step instruction on how to export from Zotero so that the resultant bibtex/biblatex file can be understood by the aglc.cls .... or is aglc ONLY designed to work within Zotero?

adamsmith

all legal styles will work best with Zotero, given CSL's somewhat limited legal vocabulary.
But you should get at least the basics to work with pandoc and the item type for cases is certainly correct in the CSL style.

First step would be finding out which biblatex type pandoc interprets as a legal case. It's possible that pandoc-citeproc's mapping of biblatex to CSL is wrong here. Converting Zotero's "case" to "jurisdiction" looks right to me, the latter is for "Court decisions, Court rulings etc." in biblatex and should thus be mapped to legal_case for CSL. So I'd start there.

But stepping back: doesn't pandoc-citeproc read CSL_JSON now? That would seem like a much less error-prone workflow since that give you all the same mappings that Zotero does by design.

edit: looks like it does: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/blob/master/man/pandoc-citeproc.1.md

swisskit

Thank you, the CSL_JSON suggest was a step in the right direct, the resulting json file seems to have the right mappings ... eg case to legal_case.

However the output remains the same, so it is looking like pandoc-citeproc or citeproc-hs is the mapping culprit.

Digging around it seems is that pandoc-citeproc expects you to cite everything in an author-date style; hence the problem with legal styles such as the Bluebook, AGLC and OSCOLA.

I will give zotxt a try ... unless you can recommend a better strategy for zotero and pandoc integration?

swisskit

After some further investigation it looks like there is something going on with aglc.csl and pandoc-citeproc. A better option for me seems to be to use the bluebook-law-review csl and modify it. On testing against aglc, OSCOLA and other legal citation csl's, the bluebook-law-review was closest to what I need.t The changes eg above n for supra and Ibid for Id seem to be achievable through the visual editor.

I will keep you posted ... it will be of interest to the very small group who need to do legal citation in Australia (to the aglc III standard) and who want to use markdown rather than Word or Libre Office.

adamsmith

I'm rather puzzled what the more general issue would be, so it would certainly be worthwhile to check with pandoc dev(s) as well.
If there are limitations of pandoc-citeproc or different interpretations of citation styles, we'd want to know about them.
Since the mapping is the same by definition (usually the most common reason for divergent style output between different systems), style output using pandoc with CSL_JSON and with Zotero should be pretty much equivalent.

It's also possible that citeproc-pandoc is spotting a systematic error in the styles (AGLC and OSCOLA are loosely based on each other and both by me, so it wouldn't be surprising they have the same issue) that Zotero is just more forgiving about. That, too, would be good to know.

swisskit

Just a quick update to let you know I now have AGLC working almost perfectly with Pandoc-Citeproc. Jus a strange result with trailing periods after Ibid and "above n" suffix not being loaded. Apart from that perfect. Not sure what changed (there have been some new releases of both pandoc-citeproc and the CSL file).

sce1001

As a member of the very small group who need to do legal citation in Australia (to the aglc III standard) and who want to use markdown rather than Word, I'd be really interested in hearing more about how you got this to work. Does it need a tweaked AGLC cls? Or a tweaked pandoc-citeproc? Are they available?

adamsmith

if we have more details about what's not working, we can try to troubleshoot this with the John at pandoc. That seems like a much better idea than everyone coming up with a custom hack. So -- what's not working specifically when using CSL_JSON created by Zotero to create AGLC citations with pandoc?

swisskit

The Ibid strip-periods issue has been resolved (see https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/185), the Above n issue remains open (see https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/31).

Note, if you manually enter any footnotes, both Ibid and Above n will screw up.

The workaround is to use pandoc-citeproc and output to Word and manually edit Ibid and Above n, or output to markdown-citations and manually edit Ibid and Above n in the markdown file.

The reason aglc.csl works in the Zotero but not in Pandoc is the difference between citeproc-js and citeproc-hs.

fbennett

Note, if you manually enter any footnotes, both Ibid and Above n will screw up.

That should not be the case. Can anyone verify this?

(Ah, wait, I may have misunderstood the issue. This seems to refer to a style requirement that discriminates between immediately-preceding cite in the immediately-preceding note, and those with an intervening note? If so, yeah, we can't tell those apart at the moment -- but I think it should be technically possible, working from the data that the processor receives.)

adamsmith

No, this is about using that in citeproc-pandoc. citeproc-js is doing fine here, so you're good ;)