Custom Style Request

Hello. As a beginning Information Science student, I am sure I will eventually learn the Citation Style Language (CSL) and be able to help others with these same tasks. But until such time, it would save me tons of time (thus leading to me learning CSL sooner) if I could quickly rename my downloaded research papers according to my preferred naming scheme. I have looked at ZotFile and it does not do what I want. In addition, it does not provide any means to choose between different file naming schemes for different categories of documents. So, I just figured I would create a publication style that fits my needs and paste that from the clipboard to rename my files. However, I looked at CSL and it is insanely convoluted. I do not have time to learn all that right now.

So, I am asking if someone who knows CSL can please create a style for me.

Here is my preferred naming scheme (Items in angle brackets are variables. Items not in angle brackets are verbatum text that I want there):

; --; pp. ;
;

As you can see, this style is designed to sort the articles by most broad information to the most specific information.

Notes:
* If a value in the date is not known, I would like that segment to be replaced by zeros.

Thanks
  • Well crap. everything in angle brackets has been stripped out. I will try square brackets.

    [Journal name or Publisher (if no journal name)]; [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]; pp. [page range]; [Article title with illegal characters stripped out]; [FirstName LastName for up to 2 authors]
  • edited January 23, 2018
    Just so you don't think this is getting ignored -- I've seen this, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Volunteer time is relatively scarce and you're essentially asking something to gift you something worth ~US$150-250 (which is the market rate for a custom CSL style) for something that's exclusively for your private use. Maybe you get lucky, but I wouldn't be too optimistic.

    Do check out the visual editor if you haven't already:
    editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/
  • Oh My. Thanks for the info.

    Of course, that confirms my assumption that the standard is difficult to use.

    Well, I've designed XML schemas in XML Schema, and I will need to learn Relax NG soon enough. I will try the visual editor, thanks.
  • edited January 24, 2018
    For anyone coming in here. I believe this is (better) achievable with zotfile's advanced renaming rules. @GrantRobertson is working on figuring that out in another thread: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/299209/#Comment_299209

    To me, using CSL seems like an unnecessarily complicated hack.
  • @anjo7539 - Thanks for trying to help. I have created a new thread at https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/70054/zotfile-user-defined-wildcards-figuring-it-all-out where I am trying to figure out everything about user-defined wildcards. I have given up on learning CSL for now. Please go to the above thread and help me figure this thing out for everyone's benefit.

    Thank you.
  • To be clear, the CSL language is fairly simple to learn and the CSL Visual Editor tool is fairly easy to easy. It still though does take time to code and test a style, and the volunteers that write styles for journals, publishers, and institutions are less inclined to do so for free for styles without a general public good.
This discussion has been closed.