could you explain how a universal locator would differ from using suffix? You called that "cheating" in the other thread, but I don't quite get why.

edit - ah OK - it's about the ibid.

Hello adamsmith,

Thanks to your precious explanations, I discovered the use of the citation panel, and adapted a 'bibliography with full notes' style (available at https://sites.google.com/site/llcommun/home).

Apparently Ibid tests the whole string.

Example:
If I use an existing locator, such as "page", and enter (without quotes)

1. "Acte 1, Scène 2"
2. "Acte 1, Scène 2"
3. "Acte 1, Scène 3"

I obtain :

1. S. BREDELOUP, « Les entrepreneurs migrants chinois au Sénégal, La métaphore du jeu de go? ». In : Le Sénégal des migrations : Mobilités, identités et sociétés. Paris : Karthala, 2008, p. Acte 1, Scène 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. Acte 1, Scène 3.

whereas, if I enter the same information in the a suffix, I obtain :

1. S. BREDELOUP, « Les entrepreneurs migrants chinois au Sénégal, La métaphore du jeu de go? ». In : Le Sénégal des migrations : Mobilités, identités et sociétés. Paris : Karthala, 2008 Acte I, Scène 2.
2. Ibid. Acte I, Scène 2.
3. Ibid. Acte I, Scène 3.

to obtain the same result as with Ibid, I would have to enter :

1. ", Acte 1, Scène 2"
2.
3. ", Acte 1, Scène 3"

that means that I would have to care about the rank of the quotation, and about the punctuation marks, which is much less convenient.

That is why, if no better solution, I intend to remove the label of "sub verbo" in my style. But I would much prefer to use a standard locator (with no label), so as not to pervert the meaning of an existing locator.

N.B. I just did a test, but "sub verbo" is not recognized (as I could read on another post, later on), so I should have to test all the other locators to remove the "sub verbo” label, as follows :

<if locator="page book chapter column figure folio issue line note opus paragraph part section volume verse" match="none">...

In case new locators were added, my style will ignore them, which is not a good thing

________________________________________________
As I said before, I am convinced that it would be useful to other users, with different needs in locators.

I was recently surprised to discover that we don't have an "article" label, which makes it rather awkward to cite constitutions, wherever you fall in the "article" versus "section" statutory turf wars.

1/ As a matter of fact, the complete information to refer to a play would include:
Acte, then Scene, then verse (if the play is in verse).

That means 3 locators for one single citation

2/ Since it's quite long, and the potential readers all know these references, we just cite :

III, 2, v. 345

That's why, in addition to more locator types and multiple locators, we would appreciate to have the possibility to associate to each locator a supplementary field "suppress locator-label" (default-value="no"), in the same way there is "suppress author".

If we consider the readers of the document all know a reference, we would enter the reference with the option "suppress locator's label" for some locators.

To obtain
III, 2, v. 345

we would enter:

Acte (suppress locator' s label=yes)
Scene (suppress locator's label= yes)
Verse (suppress locator's label=no)

but if we consider the readers don't, we would choose to display the locator's labels, we would want to display:

Acte III, Scène 2, v. 345

So we would enter:

Acte (suppress locator' s label=no)
Scene (suppress locator's label= no)
Verse (suppress locator's label=no)

3/ "universal locator" might not the right word.
What I suggest is a locator which has an empty label.
The label (if wanted) would be entered in the location itself by the user himself
(that's what we do for the moment, using "sub verbo")

So I don't see why such an universal locator would cause portability problem

4/We don't use verset.

As verse are concerned, we refer to them:
alone, combined with page, or as above.
There is no reason why they couldn't be combined with Tome, Volume, Livre, Chapter...

5/ We also use "multiple locators" such as Livre + chapitre + page, as:

liv. III, ch. IX, p. 177.

This is not exhaustive, it just corresponds to precise examples already encountered. In the future, we certainly have other demands.

It depends on the point of view:

1/ Since Zotero has introduced the locator's types, it would be nice to have more locators and multiple locators that would match precise demands thoroughly.

Users would only have to choose the right locator, and wouldn't have to bother about the labels.

But it certainly implies great change

2/ A locator with an empty label requires more attention from the users, who must know and remember what label corresponds to each zotero-not-defined locator (simple or combined).

But just considering things from a practical point of view, a locator with empty label would allow to solve many situations.

I suppose it would be much easier to realize

In Germany, France, and (at least most of) the Spanish speaking world yes.

Clearly, yes.

The US constitution has both articles and sections: http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html

"Part"?

In any case, the strategic question is what criteria we use for adding new locators.

So long as we rely on a master list of terms for locator labels, it would need to include both "section" and "article", as well as "title" (for the US Code), and probably a bunch of other things. That's going to get annoying in the UI, with every user presented with a large and swelling list of items to choose from for every type of resource, most of which are irrelevant to most of us.

We may be able to avoid that, though, if we consider that there are actually two separate types of locator label: (1) descriptive labels that require localization; and (2) instrumental labels that should be pegged to a fixed form appropriate to the cited source and the language of the document in which the citation appears.

I'll go out on a limb here, and propose that the pinpoint locators for legal materials fall under (2), and should not be subject to style-level localization. [1]

We'll see what the response to that suggestion is, but if it's correct, then l2lafitte's proposal of a "wildcard" label (however implemented in CSL and in Zotero) would actually be pretty satisfactory for legal writing. The critical things that the processor must know to render this category of locators correctly would be: (a) the locator string itself, including the label; and (b) the fact that a label is present (so that the comma-splice used in many styles when the "page" term is empty can be avoided). A "wildcard" item in the pulldown list of labels would be sufficient for that.

If law-related issues are removed from the mix, we're left with "Act" and perhaps a few other descriptive labels, which would be feasible to add.

I hope that description is clear, I'll follow up with clarification if it comes across as murky.

[1] After writing this, it occurred to me that the main attraction of the descriptive locator terms in the pull-down is not switching between languages, but switching between the forms of the locator (long, short, symbol, etc). On this latter point, too, I would propose to suggest that legal resources call for a fixed form of locator labels, which holds across all styles for that resource.

Agreed that "art." is essential for legal writing.

Lately I've been wondering whether the UI might restrict the list of locators to a subset for each item type, with some sort of "...more" facility to access the rest.

Another possibility would be to recognize the leading part of the locator as a hint to the locator label -- typing shorthand labels directly into the field would be faster than dealing with the pulldown, and a list of short-form hints (like "art. ") would be easy to remember.

(Re my proposal above to just treat the entire locator as a dumb string for the legal types, I've recently been disabused on that notion. The OSCOLA style requires that paragraph numbers be wrapped in brackets. Other styles will require "para. " or similar, so retaining localization is important.)

It's not stubbornness. The list of labels are shared between three separate parts of the system (Zotero proper, the word processor plugin, and the citation formatter). The need for coordination means that changes of this kind take place at large release cycles. This issue is definitely in the list, but it will take some more time for it to be addressed.

@julianwyatt

For the moment, since we don't use the "sub verbo" locator, we use it as a void locator, and we enter the real locator in the suffix field.
(see http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17742/locators-zotero-216/#Item_20)

we just define it as :
<term name="sub verbo" form="short">
<single></single>
<multiple></multiple>
</term>

ibid works correctly

Hoping it can help

For law, lots will be needed -- too many to be practicable in a dropdown UI element. Can supply a list in a few days, with an outline of the solution I've come up with.

It's obviously a lot more complicated to add "article / art" than thought, sorry to think it was mere stubbornness. However, the problem is still massively reducing the utility of Zotero for anyone citing international legal instruments, European legal instruments or constitutions -- this is not just lawyers!

I tried the sub-verbo work-around, but the Ibid doesn't work in the citation style my publisher requires, so I have to alter all the footnotes manually (a frustrating job).

Is it not possible to add an "other" identifier that would allow pinpoints not in the drop-down to be added without the ibid problem?