Spaces vs no spaces in citation styles

Dani_Bodor

Hi,

it would be great if citation styles would recognize whether or not is is appropriate to have a space before the citation or not* and include/exclude this accordingly. This would make switching between styles in a document much smoother. I often switch between styles because while writing I like to see who I am citing directly, while many journals ultimately require a numbered format for submission.


*: what i mean with that is: generally speaking citation styles where the citation is in between brackets (e.g. MLA, Cell) require a space between the last word before the citation and the citation itself. On the other hand superscripted citation (e.g. Nature) styles usually require the citation to be appended to the word with no space.

adamsmith

I don't disagree, but I have no idea how to solve this now, with tens of thousands of people using citation styles like MLA with manually added spaces in the text. We'd be breaking things for all of them & they wouldn't be happy (and they'd be right)

bwiernik

This could be addressed with a Document-level preference, defaulting to automatically managing spaces. That way the extra spaces could be quickly removed. Not sure whether that complexity is worth the hassle.

Dani_Bodor

not sure if this is what bwiernik meant, but would it be possible to create it as a preference whether or not to include that space in the citation style?

Alternatively, in the current citation style editor, would it be possible to create an extra space before brackets open myself in an existing citation style?

adamsmith

Tricky to handle gracefully with preference, but if we want to do this, it's likely the only way. Dan (Zotero's lead dev) is not a big fan (with good reason) of excessive customization via preferences.

This _is_ very easy to customize in any given style for you, though, yes.
Every parenthetical style has a line that looks similar to
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
Simply add a space to the prefix, i.e.
<layout prefix=" (" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">

General instructions here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
Note the part about changing title and id

dstillman

I don't really know the details here, but if it's possible to implement this as a processor option, we might be able to apply it only to new documents without putting it in the UI. (Store a pref for new documents going forward, and if it's missing for an existing document, consider it disabled.)

bwiernik

That would be a good solution I think.

Dani_Bodor

thanks adam,

for now I did what you suggested and customized an existing style, which solves at least my issue of switching back and forth between styles.

mkamwiyo

My in text citation in word is not giving spaces between words and the reference. It is just embedded in one position. If i try to fix it some words are missing. How do I fix this?