Proper way to remove a trailing period

dstambou

Just getting into zotero now - not sure if this is the right place. However, often I would like to discuss a citation, and use a comma instead of a fullstop:

e.g. original citation: "John Smith, 'Blah blah' (1979)."

to ""John Smith, 'Blah blah' (1979), notes that..."

Is there a "proper" way to delete that final fullstop (within the quotes)? Should I just delete it in the text editor or somehow remove it from the stylesheet and add my own punctuation at the end ?

fbennett

I assume this is with a footnote style? The normal way would be to add the comment in the "Suffix" field through the Zotero plugin in the word processor, as:, notes that ...The leading comma will suppress the period.

A leading space will have the same effect:␣notes that
␣(notes that ...)

dstambou

Thanks very much :) Yes, it is a footnote style. Apologies, not hugely familiar with zotero and its terminology yet, but am spending a bit of time to adapt it as I need.

I'm still getting my head around the use of the Australian Guide to Legal Citation in zotero... now to work on hacking together a style to make sure European Union regulations are properly cited !

fbennett

A couple of notes there. If you use Zotero for legal referencing, you should seriously consider moving to Juris-M (formerly "Multilingual Zotero" or MLZ). It is available as Standalone client, hosted here:

https://juris-m.github.io

Legal support has been completely revamped in Juris-M, and is now fully modular: citation styles adapt according to jurisdiction, using separate style code for each jurisdiction. This will vastly simplify style maintenance, and allows us to splice legal support onto virtually any style in the official CSL repository with relatively little effort.

fbennett

(I should note that the style editor on the Juris-M site is probably inaccessible at the moment, due to an expired SSL certificate. I'm applying for a fresh one, and the editor should be working again within a week or so.)

dstambou

Thanks fbennett, this is very helpful. It doesn't appear to have AGLC support, but hopefully one of the styles will be close enough for workable purposes.

Appreciate the heads up.

fbennett

The way it would work is to take the existing AGLC style, remove any macros that are specific to primary legal resources, and add a small amount of code to invoke modular legal style code. Then you would need legal style modules for Australian law. Those would be close to OSCOLA, which I'll be working up for English references over the next couple of weeks.