Can't import style created with Visual CSL Editor

z8080

I'd like to define a new citation style for use in Powerpoint presentations (with content pasted as a Word outline), whereby inline citations are in the format (FirstAuthor et al., year, AbbrevJName), for instance (Smith et al., 2011, NatComm).

To this end, I made a copy of the apa.csl file under \zotero\styles, named it apaJname, and edited it in the Visual CSL Editor, as follows.

Under InlineCitations|Layout|Group, I added the variable "publisher", with form=short. The preview only includes a thesis and a book, thus I could not check if this really adds the short journal name. I downloaded the CSL file and tried to install it in Zotero, but this gives the message "An unexpected error occurred while installing apaJname.csl".

I also found this* page, which indicates to use Macro:Title-container to obtainthe short journal name; however, in the Visual CSL Editor, that macro is not to be found.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance!

* https://formadoct.doctorat-bretagneloire.fr/c.php?g=594171&p=4753999

adamsmith

form="short" on publisher shouldn't do anything (you want variable container-title form="short"). This shouldn't prevent the style from installing, though.
Have you tried this again after re-starting Zotero? Can you post the style somewhere?

z8080

Thanks, that was indeed the variable I needed. And I had forgotten about restarting Zotero - now it works :) Thanks again!

z8080

While I'm at it: this relates to an older feature request that AFAIK was not implemented, at least for Zotero's MS Word addon - the ability to display inline citations with a different font size/colour.

Using the Visual CSL Editor, I was able to have the journal name displayed in italics, which is already more control than you have by using Zotero's settings in Word, which don't allow defining a "citation" style.

However, what I'd like to do is to display the entire inline citation using a font that is of a different size&colour than that of the Normal stlye. I did not find any settings for this under Layout|Group, but are such options perhaps elsewhere to be found in the Visual CSL Editor?

adamsmith

The only things you can do with CSL styles are listed here: https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#formatting
bold, italics, small-caps, underline, and sub and superscript. (You can also do all caps, but I'd recommend against that). No fonts, no font size, no colors.

(In case you didn't see it in one of the old threads, you _can_ turn on field shading in Word, though, to highlight Zotero citations in grey)

z8080

Ah I see, thanks.
As for the field shading, I was aware of that as a workaround to highlight Zotero fields while editing a document, but in this case I would need those to be highlighted in the published (PDF) document.