Upgrade Storageis-phrase condition?
As part of my continuing campaign to precipitate feature bloat, I would like to request an "is-phrase" condition, as a complement to is-date and is-numeric. This would return true if a space character is contained in the field. What prompts this request is a few illustrative citations reproduced in (again) the Bluebook:
The middle example will be a problem, though, because the "ed." suffix is automatically generated. By entering the literal string, you would get an extraneous suffix, like this:
The alternatives would be either to add a "Printing" field to the GUI, or to list an erratum for the Zotero Bluebook style. An is-phrase extension is more satisfactory than the latter, and constitutes a smaller hammer than the former.
Anyway, that's the use case and the argument. Hope this can be taken onboard.
The first and the last examples are not a problem. They each involve only a locator, entered through the GUI. Because in Bluebook, for the book type, the locator "page" will ordinarily prefix the locator with a single space, the user can just call it a "page" and enter the full string text of the pinpoint.The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation R. 1.2(e), at 24 (Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. eds., 17th ed. 2000).
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation 293 tbl. T.10 (Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. eds., 17th ed. 9th prtg. 2000).
William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth act 4, sc. 2.
The middle example will be a problem, though, because the "ed." suffix is automatically generated. By entering the literal string, you would get an extraneous suffix, like this:
If an is-phrase condition were available, the default suffix could be suppressed in these special cases. Most styles use the number declaration to format the edition, and so would pass through only the edition number, formatting it as ordinal or whatever as require; so content with extraneous strings should play well there as well.The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation 293 tbl. T.10 (Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. eds., 17th ed. 9th prtg. ed. 2000).
The alternatives would be either to add a "Printing" field to the GUI, or to list an erratum for the Zotero Bluebook style. An is-phrase extension is more satisfactory than the latter, and constitutes a smaller hammer than the former.
Anyway, that's the use case and the argument. Hope this can be taken onboard.
It would be nice if someone else (Rintze? Dan?) could take a look at this issue and figure out if there are other ways to handle this.
Understood about the independence of Zotero and CSL. The roles of the components in the wider world is starting to come into focus.
Here's a breakdown of the actual data entered for the citation elements:
Title: The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation
Page: 293 tbl. T.10
Editor: Columbia Law Review Ass'n
Editor: Harvard Law Review Ass'n
Editor: Pennsylvania Law Review
Editor: Yale Law Journal
Edition: 17th ed. 9th prtg.
Date: 2000
I think that the "293 tbl. T.10" refers to table number 10 in section T, on page 293. The "9th prtg." string means "9th printing".
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4956/difficulty-formatting-complex-book-editions-in-bibliography/
I don't really like the addition of a printing field, as it seems to be used so sparsely. I do think an escape character could to the trick. For example, if the edition field contains the escape character (e.g. quotes: "17th ed. 9th prtg."), it makes sense to just skip any automatic addition of terms like "ed." in the citation output.
John Doe, Anonymous Man (1st ed. 2nd prntg. 2000)
There is no "printing" field, and it's so uncommon that it's probably not worth the candle to add one. But entering "1st ed. 2nd prntg." to the edition field would yield "1st ed. 2nd prntg. ed.", which is wrong. A quote-escape could be picked up in the style to suppress the final "ed."
Probably the best next step is for me to push things as far as they'll go in the current environment. I'm about to start working through examples in the style manual, starting with Books, Pamphlets and Other Nonperiodic Materials. When I have a finite list of exceptional cases from this section, I'll post again, and see if we can work out acceptable ways of handling them. Thanks for your feedback, Dan, it means a lot.
I'll keep this escape trick as a last-ditch resort. I'm about 50 cites into the "books" section of the Bluebook, about 1/3 of the way through that bit. Doing these test cases is certainly proving helpful. I'll be able to offer a much more more well-composed set of suggestions/requests/minor whinges when I've finished with this first batch.
I may have neglected to say earlier that Zotero is a real pleasure to work with. I've shown the system to my senior colleague in our academic writing program, and we're now aiming to roll out the style to students from April, with (touch wood) at least basic legal citation support for the US, the UK, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Here's the change needed in chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/cite.js, at around line 2144:
// Quoted strings are never numeric
For awhile there I thought I was having problems with available memory or OO bugs or some other weird source of discouragement. But the change above appears to have cleared everything up.- if(value.match(Zotero.CSL._quotedRegexp)) {
+ if(value != "" && value.toString().match(Zotero.CSL._quotedRegexp)) {