Removing punctuation in certain circumstances

tipichris · October 4, 2013

I've come across an odd requirement in a style guide - at least it seems odd to me - and am struggling to find a neat way to implement it without having completely different sections for online and print versions of the same type of sources.

Online versions include the phrase "[online]" immediately after the title or container title, and separated from it by a space. That's easy enough. But the [online] tag must never be followed by a full stop. This is the case even if the title in a print source is.

So a print book is

Dudley, P. R. (2001) Wavelets in Computing: An Efficient Means of Conducting Research. 2nd edn.
Oxford: Oxford University Press

But an online book is

Potter, H. (2005) An Introduction to Human Anatomy [online] 4th edn. London: Adam Arnold. available
from <http://anatomy/introduction/human/htm>; [27 March 2006]

There are several other situations where this occurs in the style guide and when I questioned it I was told that the logic is that [online] is never followed by a full stop. Is there a simple way of implementing this, or am I stuck with some extensive rewriting and tortuous logic?

adamsmith · October 4, 2013

there's nothing super elegant. What I'd do is to include the period as part of the title macro, i.e. you'd have something like

<choose>
<if variable="URL">
<group delimiter=" ">
<text variable="title/>
<text term="online" prefix="[" suffix="]"/>
</group>
</if>
<else>
<text variable="title" suffix="."/>
</else>
</choose>

Obviously the whole thing becomes more complicated as you need different formatting for titles (italics, quotes, etc.), but that's the general idea.

tipichris · October 5, 2013

Thanks. It did indeed get more complicated than that, largely because though [online] is never followed by a period, it is not the case that the title always is. But your suggestion formed the basis of something that seems to have worked.