Issue with a citation style created with the Simple Style creator

Z User

Hi,

I have created a Style with Simple Style Creator.Tthe bibliography works fine when I click on Insert a Bibliography but footnotes appear blank. I also have noticed that the IEEE style which already was installed on the Zotero beta 2 I downloaded a few weeks ago. A similar bug has been reported earlier :

Labmonkey Sep 19th 2007
The Nature citation style doesn't seem to be working with Word (for me, at least). Footnotes are left blank. Though it will produce a bibliography, I am left with footnote numbers at the bottom of each page without citations next to them.

I however do not know if there is a link between these problems.

I am using NeoOffice 3 and Zotero beta 2.

Furthemore, it would be great if the simple style generated could be set to export dates in the format d/mm/year instead of just year/mm/d.

adamsmith

Hi,
first, the simple style generator isn't all that great and I'm under the impression the lemaxx has stopped development on it.
Then, nature and similar styles (including IEEE) don't have footnotes. You should just get numbers in the text when inserting citations, nothing else. Do you actually get empty footnotes at the bottom of your page? That would be both strange and wrong.

For your date issue, you can manually change that in the style.
Look at
http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
for a quick intro to modifying csls
You want to look for
something that looks like
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="year"/>
<date-part name="month"/>
<date-part name="day"/>
</date>

and just change the order of the date-parts.

Z User

Hi,

Thanks very much for your help and your quick reply. Actually, I have nothing at the bottom of the page, not even the number of the citation. Thanks also for your help with the date format.

Z User

I have made some amendments to my style and inserted some special characters I could not set in Simple Style Generator - it has perhaps been written in ASCII. Nevetheless I cannot understand where there is not any footnote in my document.

adamsmith

once again - nature styles and the like do not produce footnotes. They aren't supposed to - neither in Zotero nor in the journal - have a look at Nature journal: There are just numbers in the text and a biography in the end - no footnotes.
If you do want footnotes, you have to use a style that has class="note" in the header (in the line that starts with <style )
and you need to define what's in that note in the <citation> part of the bibliography.
I don't know if the simple generator can do that.

Z User

No, the simple style generator cannot do that, I have used it to create this style. I now understand where the problem does come from and will take a look at Chicago with footnotes and amend the style I just created. Thanks for the explanation.

Z User

OK. My style now also produces footnotes. I just have a small issue. The style relies on the "edition" macro to insert edition number. I use the suffix " ed." after the edition number e.g., 5 ed. . I however would like to set the style 5th ed., th being not in the same alignment as ed. Is it possible to set a suffix with two different alignment instructions ?

adamsmith

If I'm not mistaken, csl can't do ordinal numbers properly, so you'd always have "th" even for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd (but try it out, days do work with form="ordinal" )

But if that's not a concern, you can
put the edition in a separate term,
something along the lines of
<text term="edition" form="short" suffix="."/>

If you can't figure it out it would help to let us know exactly what you want things to look like - is it: 5^th ed.?

bdarcus

The Simple Style Generator is essentially worthless at this point. It takes (much) more work to fix the broken styles it creates than it does to go through the process of tweaking an already-existing style.

Z User

Thanks for your replies. Yes, exactly it is like adamsmith writes it in the last line of his message.

Z User

Oh sorry no, I replied too quicly. Th should be higher than the rest of the text. If you mention for example square meters , the small 2 which means power two slightly is higher than the m.
If you do not exactly understand what I want th to look like, please compare the position of the 2 and the m in the square metre symbol or like the representation of an exponent in maths.

The th of 5th edition also should be slightly higher than 5 and edition.

I am using the line of code adamsmith suggested elsewsere in my code but it clearly does not reproduce the difference

adamsmith

this should do what you want:
<number variable="edition" form="numeric"/>
<text value="th" suffix=" " vertical-align="sup"/>
<text term="edition" form="short" suffix="." />

Note that it doesn't show up correctly in the test panel.
But this will always give you the th as noted.
Look at the Chicago Style to see how to get real ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd), albeit without the superscripting.

Z User

Yes, I had the feeling it was impossible to set a macro with two types of alignment in the same suffix and I already knew that the suffix would have to always be the same. I however preferred to ask just in case I misunderstood something and I must confess I had that hope when I posted my message yesterday. I also noticed that I could get ordinal numbers but supersciption really seems useful to me. Thanks for your help anyway.

Z User

I Just tested the code and there seems to be a bug since everthing which comes after the th also is written with superscripting even if I specified vertical-align="baseline" in all the macros I use and if added "baseline" to all the lines which were not based on macros. The problem is the same with subscripting.

adamsmith

you'd need to post the code somewhere for troubleshooting - while there are some issues with superscript, that shouldn't be the caste.
You can just post code without registration over at
gist.github.com
just paste it in the window and click "Create Public gist" at the bottom

Z User

I will do so. Thanks again.

Z User

Could you please let me know what I should type in order to correctly configure a macro.
I would like to set assign the same style all the items that have the same word in the publication field.

I therefore use the following code :

<macro name="title">
<choose>
<if type="chapter">
<choose>
<if variable="container-title" match="word">
<text variable="title" preffix="V° " suffix=", "/>
…

Could you please let me know if it is correct ?
Please note that the word is not the complete publication title but only a word all the items have in common in their zotero publication field.

The syntax seems correct but the prefix is not applied.

adamsmith

you can't use specific content of fields as a condition.
match=" " can only be any or none.
i.e. if you use
if variable="containter-title"
the only if you can trigger is if there is something in the container title field or not (i.e. any or none).
Frank who is one of the people who has thought most about this, explains some of the reasons for that here:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9141/display-only-the-first-author-in-a-homemade-citation-style/#Item_9

Z User

I understand the reasons behind this decision although I think the contrary would allow to elaborate much nicer macros. If I can't use it I will have to rely on exceptions by type and this really is not convienient. I have seen that the question about adding more than two exceptions has been raised many times but I haven't seen any portion of documentation which addressed that issue. Could you please let me know how I could add more exceptions manually ?

Furthemore, it seems that "entry-encyclopedia" is treated as "chapter", is this due the code or a mistake I made ?

adamsmith

I don't understand the part about exceptions, what are you trying to do exactly?
The encyclopedia = chapter is coded that way - though it's labeled as a fallback.
You can find the mapping here
chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/csl.js

Z User

Thanks for the mapping. The simple style generator can create one style with two exception, e.g. book and journal article. I however would need to set more than the just two exceptions, e.g. book, journal article, entry encyclopedia and rapport. How do I do this ?

adamsmith

<choose>
<if type="book">
...
</if>
<else-if type="chapter>
...
</else-if>
<else-if type="article-journal>
...
</else-if>
<else>
...
</else>

As per above you can't treat encyclopedia entries separately.
Also, for "report" to work, you need to test for it _before_ "book" - otherwise reports just get treated as books. (i.e. <if type="report">...<else-if type="book"> works; <if type="book">... <else-if type="report>... doesn't work.

Z User

In fact before I posted I already tried to add more exceptions by using else-if. One of these exceptions was entry-encyclopedia. I did not know why It always treated as a chapter which also was present in the style. Now I understand, it is a question of mapping.

Is there a chance the mapping evolves so that it would be possible to use entry-encyclopedia as well as chapter ?

Z User

This is just to clarifiy that I understans it is easier to map things this way but it always is a problem when one has to add new types because then one has to rewrite the code in order to put if type=entry-encyclopedia before chapter, for example.

adamsmith

yes, you can post it as a separate feature request. What you would want to include is an example style that cites chapters and encycl. entries so differently that it cannot be achieved with current Zotero specifications.

Btw. as Bruce says, I strongly recommend against using the simple style creator or basing your style on its output. It's a much better idea to start from a high quality existing style such as APA or CMOS

Edited: Yes, indeed recommend against!

dstillman

(That would be "recommend against" using the simple style creator.)

Z User

I totally agree with you but, beside the fact that CSL and XML were new to me when I posted my first message, there was no indication on the website about where to start. It only is later that I discovered that in fact the SSG created code that was the opposite of good syntax. If I had seen on the website that this tool creates styles that were uneasy to modify, that a condition cannot be tested using a specific content field, I probably would have started differently. The syntax indeed is not difficult to understand, the only problem is that I considered the style generated by the generator as a model of good coding practices.

This is not a reproach since I know the SSG is a tool designed to cope with the most obvious needs. It is just one of the reasons why I sticked to the SSG.

Furthermore, Zotero really is an attractive tool especially if one likes to use open source apps, not only because of their price for the independence they offer. Zotero however is limited by another factor, it was conceived by anglo-saxon people that were not aware of different ways of mananging sources in diffrent countries which is absolutely understandable since one cannot know everything. I am not even sure that commercial solutions are doing a better job from that point of view since I have not tested them.

A good example of that is encyclopaedia-entry and chapter which are based on a totally different layout, i.e., different prefix, diffrent content and diffrent font style. If I understand you well I cannot achieve completly diffrent outputs using the actuel version of the code.

Considering this, one can undertand the other reason which explains why I sticked to the SSG-made style even if I also looked at Chicago Full with bibliography: it was the closest to what I wanted to achieve.

Despite this period of blind searching, Zotero certainly will be really useful. Thank you also for your helpfulness.

adamsmith

Yes, we should probably put a warning next to the SSG link on the Zotero site.
Actually, something like different requirements for Encyclopedia's isn't generally a big issue (and I don't think it is tied to int'l limitations - there are other things - such as how CSL deals with quotation marks, that would be better examples of that) and it might actually be possible to do this in a different way - why don't you give us examples of what you want to achieve instead of keeping it abstract.
Remember also that Zotero is very young in software terms, just in it's third year, less time since going out of beta. So a lot of things are still being learned and added - including a lot of features for wider int'l compatibility.
Also - as I said, if you post mapping for encyclopedia as a feature request with good documentation there's a good chance it can be implemented.

Z User

It would be a good idea to put a warning on the SSG page as well since I found it without searching the zotero site but the internet.

In my style chapters are set like this :

Author, Italicised title in Publication, Publisher, Date

Encyclopedia :

Publication, V° Entry

An other encyclopedia format :

Publication, V° Entry, Fasc. collection-number

As you can imagine when I learned when I learned that I could not test a condition with a qpecfic foeld content I siet a condition if collection-number match="any" to distinguish through the encyclopedia type. All these items are still treated like chapter even if the condition : if type entry-encl. is tested before else if article journal and if else chapter, else

adamsmith

We can't do much about the SSG page - it's not connected to Zotero - though lemaxx occasionally stops by in the forum.

In CSL there is no type entry-encyclopedia so you can't test for it. Not all types in Zotero have corresponding types in CSL.
I still need specific quotations to see how this looks to be able to think about a solution.

Z User

I know I cannot test for it and that's where the problem is.


n° refers to the §

Chapter output (used for collective works) :
A. Martin, Rich text citations in A history of Zotero development, Publisher, 2009, p. or n°

Encyclopedia
The CSL encylopedia, Publisher, V° Zotero, n°
Another Encyclopedia, Fasc. n° 1234, V° Zotero, n°

(The number corresponds to the collection number)

Other works (not periodicals)
A. Martin, My book, Collection, 5^th ed., Publisher, 2009, p, or n°

The th is supscripted not subscripted

In the bibliography, I do not mention pages or n°


I hope this helps.