CSL's "position" and MS Word "section breaks"

tillheilmann
Is it possible to reset CSL's "position" condition when a "section break" occurs within a MS Word document?

Explanation: I am preparing an edited volume with contributions by different authors (each in a separate MS Word "section"). Citations are of the form: "Name, Title, Address, Year" for the first reference to the item and "Name, Year" for subsequent ones. Some bibliographic entries are referenced by more than one author. However, I want to have a consolidated bibliography at the end of the book *and* I want recurring references to "restart" with each author, i.e. a citation of an entry already referenced by author N(1) should not be treated as "subsequent" when author N(2, 3, ...) first references it again.
  • adamsmith
    it's currently not. IIRC this has been brought up before and turns out to be quite tricky because of how Word sets those section breaks, but @fbennett would remember that better.
  • tillheilmann
    edited April 11, 2013
    I thought about splitting the Word file into separate documents for each chapter and then merging them into one big file when I'm done editing them. However, this probably wouldn’t work (I guess, I haven't actually tried) because ambiguous author-year citations will not be disambiguated in the original separate files as the citations there do not "know" about the citations in the other files. Any ideas for a workaround? (A possibility--when working with a single big file--would be an option to manually force a "full" author-title citation the same way we can already exclude authors.)
  • fbennett
    It would be a little tedious to set up, but if the individual chapters were given a bibliography that had all of the cites in the full document registered as uncited items, you should get proper disambiguation. Or just paste the full thesis text after the chapter you're rendering, and discard it after you've proofed and printed.
  • tillheilmann
    Okay, how would I do that (i.e. register all references of the complete document as "uncited" items in the individual chapter files)?
  • fbennett
    For that approach, you would have to insert them using the "Edit
    bibliography" button in the word processor (hence "tedious"). Pasting
    the full thesis text after the chapter you're printing would be
    simpler, although it might be slower to refresh.
  • tillheilmann
    Sorry: I never even noticed the "Edit bibliography" entry in Word's menu. I can see how it would be tedious to use that feature. The second approach, however, is clever, thanks! It will also be somewhat cumbersome, though, because the volume consists of 300+ pages, 30+ contributions, 1000+ cites and 400+ bibliographic items. My machine already needs up to 10 seconds to add/edit a reference.
  • fbennett
    Yes. Large documents are a bottleneck. They can be sped up, but it will require attention from the developers. There's no short-term solution for that one.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

Sign In or Register to comment.