Modifying et al

Cozmo

For the Harvard system I need to use the et al is done like this: (Lee, et al., 2009). The closest I have got with the style is (Lee , et al., 2009) How do I get rid of that space after the name?

The changes I made to get that far:

In the citation tags --> added a comma to the delimiter

<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="author-short"/>
<text macro="year-date"/>
</group>

and terms --> added comma and full stop to string.

<terms>
<locale xml:lang="en">
<term name="et-al">, et al.</term>
</locale>
</terms>

That space needs to go, how do I do it?

adamsmith

I don't think you can or should hardcode the ", " into the et al.
What happens if you take out the term definition of et al include into the names option of the author-short macro
delimiter-precedes-last="always"
that should put the comma there. Otherwise the extra space that you see is what you have in delimiter=" ": Zotero treats the et al. just like another author.

Cozmo

Thank you.

fbennett

@adamsmith,

That's interesting, I didn't know that it worked that way. Just for info, in the new processor & CSL 1.0 it will work slightly differently. delimiter-precedes-last will be applied only when an "and" join is requested, and an optional "et-al" element will be available in names for styling of the et al. string, and the comma can be added as a prefix on that element.

adamsmith

I discovered that yesterday...
I think what you do with it in 1.0 makes perfect sense - as displayed by the fact that it would have been a lot more intuitive to Cozmo.

Cozmo

Actually doing that didn't do anything, the comma didn't get put inbetween the et al and the name... it got put after the et al so I had (Lee et al.,, 2009).

adamsmith

sorry - that appears to just work with 2 or more authors (as in Lee, Meyer, et al. 2009)

I don't have a good idea then.

Cozmo

Grr... they have put so much flexibility and I managed to find a locked character within 10 mins of finding this software...

adamsmith

well, as you can see above, the next csl version will accommodate this.

Cozmo

:D

St_B

I would like to keep "et al." in lowercase even if the text-case is uppercase in the author macro. Is that possible ?
I tried to modify the "et-al" term but failed. Can you help ?

fbennett

Separate styling of the et-al term is not possible in the current CSL processor installed in Zotero, although this will become possible in a future version.

St_B

ok, thanks a lot for the swiftness of your reply !