Changes to freely localized styles MLA 8th & universita-pontificia-salesiana dashes/inverted commas

ESJ1153

Hi,
following the documentation I started searching for things I'd like to change in the above mentioned styles.

For example I would like to have numbers separated by the short dash "-" not the longer one "–" (even if here and within Zotero they are both rendered as long).

I would also like to replace „…“ in German with «...» within the style.

I tried searching both long dash (alt + -) and inverted comma in the style (universita-ponticificia-salesiana) but could not find them.

Any clues if or how this could be done? Thank you in advance.

adamsmith

You can look at the German locale style, where all of these are defined under Punctuation
<!-- PUNCTUATION -->
<term name="open-quote">„</term>
<term name="close-quote">“</term>
<term name="open-inner-quote">‚</term>
<term name="close-inner-quote">‘</term>
<term name="page-range-delimiter">–</term>

You can add a locale section to any style
(<locale xml:lang="de-DE"><terms>...</terms></locale>

or, where the section already exists add additional terms to an existing locale section

ESJ1153

Thank you adamsmith:

the German locale style is not among the styles I can access from the Zotero file editor and I cannot see it opening the subfolders of my Zotero folder in my Library folder (I am using a Mac Os High Sierra).

How do I access it?

adamsmith

It's here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/blob/master/locales-de-DE.xml
but as I said, you wouldn't actually modify the file (it's packaged with Zotero, so you can't easily). You would integrate parts of it in your style(s) of choice.

ESJ1153

Thank you so much adamsmith, that helped for the quotes but curiously not for the dash.

After I enter the short dash in the modified style and save it to the styles folder and open it again I have the longer dash instead of the short one.

–

Do you know why?

adamsmith

What's in Zotero? I'm not sure if the citation styles transform from en-dash to hyphen (they do the other way around)

ESJ1153

I did a second test with the MLA style.

Modifying it and adding the rule for the short dash. In this style the short dash stays there when I open again and the output is correct.

Not so in the universita-ponticificia-salesiana modified style where it gets transformed in the code itself to a longer dash.

adamsmith

Make sure you change the style IDs. Zotero doesn't transform anything in styles, but it _will_ overwrite styles with the version from the repository if they have the same ID

ESJ1153

So I did, I am working with the modified versions. Do you know how it is that the MLA would keep the short dash and not the salesiana style?

adamsmith

You're saying the actual content of the CSL file changes, right? That must be something on your computer. Zotero simply wouldn't do that.

ESJ1153

I actually found out why the salesiana style would not keep the short dash adamsmith.
For some reason I wasn't saving the last changes and it was showing the style prior to that. Now that I managed to save the last changes, both styles show the changes correctly. Thanks a lot.