CSL variable "original-author" is not recognized, other "orig-" variables are

mshino

I am using Zotero 5.0.85 on Mac OS X 10.15.4 in a multilingual environment.

In order to show the original data like author, title, publisher of a paper I have to quote in English, I add these in the Extra field as "original-author", "original-title", "original-publisher" and want to add this information in a CSL style that adds it in brackets at the end of the bibliographical entry like so:

Kinoshita N. ed. 2020. Studies on the Hirota Site in Tanegashima Island, Japan – Research on the movement of people based on biological and technological traits. Kumamoto: Kumamoto University. [ 木下 尚子 『広田遺跡の研究　ー　人の形質・技術・移動』 　熊本大学]

Unfortunately, original authors are not recognized, although they are mentioned in the documentations. So, they do not show up in the style preview in Zotero, and they do not show up in the biblatex file exported with BetterBibTex.

When I tried to transform an existing style with the Visual Style editor, the variable "original-author" did not show up in the drop down menu, but "original-year", "original-title", "original-publisher", and "original-publisher-place" do appear.

So I thought there may be something wrong with using the original-author, but I entered that in my style in the XML editor. But, as said above, the authors do not appear.

I also tried "illustrator" and "director" and other content creators, they all did not appear. So I think there is something wrong with people's names or persons. And indeed, content creators are a bit tricky data format I can imagine.

For the time being I use the field "original-publisher-place" for the original authors, but of course, this is a clumsy workaround, and one can hardly offer these stylesheets to the public.

What can be done? What can I do?

bwiernik

You should use original-author. If it doesn’t show up in the Visual Editor, that would be a bug. @damnation can you reproduce?

mshino

Great, really appreciated help.

I will enter both (workaround and correct variable) personally for the time being and officially only work with original-author.

It may be that other variables with names show the same problem (illustrator etc., that I used to test work arounds).

Finally, it is recommended to separate family names and given names with || in the extra field. Of course, this did not work either, and I wonder how I should separate several names. -- But to be honest, if I can just enter the names in one line, that would be a great improvement to any other solutions I have tested in the recent years. CSL and Zotero is great.

damnation

original-author works fine for me. Example output:
"Arce O. 2017. Invención de cura contra plagas. Original by Koch, Robert. 80 pp. Thieme Verlag."

original author was entered in extra field as: "original-author: Koch, Robert"

Can you share your CSL code? (pastebin, hastebin etc.)
Maybe there's something weird going on there.

adamsmith

(and original-author is available in the visual editor under "Names" together with the other creator variables)

bwiernik

To enter multiple creators in Extra, place them on separate lines:
Illustrator: Jones || Alice
Illustrator: Smith || Julia M.
Original author: Shimizu || Tetsu

mshino

@damnation

Thanks for testing. I am not used to services like pastebin and hope it is OK to enter it here, just dropping the brackets at the beginning of the lines.

Version 1:

At the end of the bibliographyl yesterday I added -- which seems to be wrong:

```
group prefix=" [" suffix="]">
text variable="original-author"/>
text variable="original-title" prefix="　 " suffix="　　"/>
text variable="original-publisher" prefix="　"/>
/group>

/layout>
/bibliography>
```

Version 2:

Today I changed the "text" to "names":

```
group prefix=" [" suffix="]">
names variable="original-author"/>
text variable="original-title" prefix="　 " suffix="　　"/>
text variable="original-publisher" prefix="　"/>
/group>
/layout>
/bibliography>
```

Unfortunately, the original-author still does not show up.

In my extra field, a added the original-author etc. as

```
Citation key: kinoshita2020en
Original Author: 木下 尚子
Original Title:『広田遺跡の研究　ー　人の形質・技術・移動』 　
Original Publisher: 熊本大学
```

Thanks again,
Maria

mshino

@adamsmith

Thanks, found it!

mshino

@bwiernik

Thanks for this, I will use it that way, and I hope that I get the authors working...

adamsmith

I'd expect version 2 to work. Where/how are you testing?

mshino

I have copied "European Archaeology Harvard" and simply added the text at the end of the layout with my XML Editor Oxygen.

Development and testing works super simple: I change a bit, add the Style to Zotero and look at the preview.

If you like, I can send you the file in the making?

emilianoeheyns

Unfortunately, original authors are not recognized, although they are mentioned in the documentations. So, they do not show up in the style preview in Zotero, and they do not show up in the biblatex file exported with BetterBibTeX.

original-author should be recognized by BBT; if it's not, that's a bug. If this is the case, I'd appreciate it if you could open an issue on BBT's github page.

mshino

@emilianoeheyns

After JurisM was recommended for me, I started using it and deleted all "original" information from my extra fields. So for testing now I just copied the data from above into one entry, and they work. This means, the data are entered in the BibTex note field, and the original author is recognized now as well.

```
note = {Original Author: 木下 尚子
Original Title:『広田遺跡の研究　ー　人の形質・技術・移動』 　
Original Publisher: 熊本大学},

```

So, it seems that it works fine now; definitely, that was not the case when I used Zotero, but I am sure that is was me that screwed something up then.

Two comments to the behavior:

(1) It would be nice to have BBT create fields from this fields instead of putting this into the notes field. BibTex and Biblatex can work with such additional fields, and they could therefore be adressed in styles.

(2) BBT can distinguish the names in the Far Eastern scripts (i.e., it separates family name and given name like in `editor = {木下, 尚子},`) and it can adress field variants from JurisM, in this case it was the english version of the title (BibLatex field "usere") and the Roman transliteration of the title (Biblatex field "titleaddon"). QUESTION: Is there a place where I can learn how to adress these variants? I would like to create a CSL style for multilingual bibliographies in JurisM, and even for the helpful people from JurisM as well as CSL development this task seems to be not trivial.

Anyway, thanks a lot,
Maria

emilianoeheyns

(1) bibtex and biblatex have very little opinion about what fields are in an entry. They do stipulate which fields are verbatim, creator-type, literal-list, title-type, etc, but a lot of the actual work is left to the style in use. "Can work with" is therefore ambiguous:

1. "work with" in the sense that bib(la)tex doesn't keel over and die when you put random (validly structured) fields in, sure; you can add a field emilianoheyns: {was here} and bib(la)tex won't complain (too much).

2. But "work with" in the sense that a given field will yield meaningful output with the majority of styles, that's an entirely different matter. origdate is supported by biblatex, and BBT in biblatex mode should produce it. I see that I don't currently do anything with origpublisher. You can open an issue on github for that.

(2) I certainly can't distinguish between names in far eastern scripts; if BBT does the right thing there, it's because someone hand-held me through getting it there. But I know absolutely nothing about CSL. If your question is about what data Juris-M puts there, I usually just export to BetterBibTeX JSON or Better CSL and see what's there. The rest I ask on zotero-dev.

mshino

Thank you for your quick reply. I like the field "emilianoheyns: {was here} ". But seriously, your information is appreciated, it helps me to get what I need.

As you say, additional fields in Biblatex are not helpful if the standard styles (CSL or Latex) are used. But in my field of research I cannot use these styles anyway, and this is why all my colleagues still write their bibliographies manually paper by paper.

bwiernik

It’s not clear to me whether you are wanting to use CSL or BibLaTeX to format your papers. If you want to use CSL, then you need to write a CSL-m for Jurism. The polyglot Chicago style and the Japan Sociological Society style would be good templates: https://juris-m.github.io/downloads/

I recommend you use Jurism’s functions for transliterations of names, titles, etc., rather than the “original-“ variables. If you aren’t sure how to use those in references, see the Jurism manual and mailing list here: https://juris-m.github.io/support/

mshino

Sorry to be unclear.

I want to use CSL, and I want to write CSL styles. I have had some intensive look into the polyglot Chicago style and into the Japan sociological Society style and tweaked them a bit.

But from this experience I do not see any way to adress all field variants of the JurisM database.

I just posted today on this thread because @emilianoheyns took the time to answer on an older thread and I did not want to let this unanswered. This thread dates back to the time before I started using JurisM.

I myself do not plan to use BibLatex any longer for my work. CSL and JurisM provides much better options for my purpose.

emilianoeheyns

additional fields in Biblatex are not helpful if the standard styles (CSL or Latex) are used.

Are you by any chance using pandoc? CSL has no connection with biblatex. CSL processors cannot consume bib(la)tex files, so CSL styles can never use biblatex fields. Pandoc does an internal conversion from bib(la)tex to CSL-JSON, which it then feeds to the CSL processor/style, but if that's your build path, you are vastly better off having Zotero generate (Better or not) CSL-JSON.

The reason for this is that the transformation from bib(la)tex to CSL-JSON is by necessity lossy. And without having looked at it at all it's a fairly safe bet the case-conversion it performs has problems, as all case-conversions in this domain will have. If it doesn't perform case conversions, you immediately run into other problems. If you go straight from Zotero to CSL-JSON to the CSL processor you sidestep the majority of these problems; there's less translation steps, and no case conversions (which involve a fair amount of guessing) are required.

emilianoeheyns

Our answers must have crossed, sorry. There's ongoing work in biblatex to provide better support for things like this:

https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/1273

https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/416#issuecomment-531138722

but you need the newest biblatex toolchain to play.

mshino

About pandoc: Yes, this is my main note taking and writing environment. Earlier, I converted the .md file to Latex and then used Biblatex. Now I plan to go CSL.

But I have some colleagues in the Natural Sciences who prefer BibTex, and for this, BBT is excellent, we share it all with git.

Thank you for the links. I was a bit involved although I am not very fit with all this. After all I am frustrated with the development of biblatex as far as multilingual usage is concerned, although I really appreciate the effort of plk and the other contributors. Anyway, many people with excellent knowledge, so nothing progresses right. JurisM does just what is needed to be done.