The Citation Style File Error (Report ID: 2008223091)

sangoli · October 30, 2018

I am using a customized citation style format but there is an error when I use it recently. Please help.

sangoli · October 30, 2018

Here is the citation format file:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApHS9w_WPCwhgYdGJxxgV1Mv079ljw

bwiernik · October 30, 2018

What is th exact error?

Can you paste your style code to https://hastebin.com, save it, and post a link here?

sangoli · October 31, 2018

Can't use it after the recent update of Zotero.

https://hastebin.com/avedepevek.xml

adamsmith · October 31, 2018

The style was still in the (very, very) old, CSL 0.8 format. Apparently Zotero (probably accidentally) dropped support for these old styles, but they can be easily updated

I've uploaded an updated version of your style here: https://hastebin.com/ahixuzadof.xml

@dstillman would you know if this was you or Frank that broke the compatibility with 0.8 styles? Would probably be good to either restore or add a clearer error message. (I'm perfectly fine with the latter option)

sangoli · October 31, 2018

thanks!

As there is no Chinese style version for my seminary, we've edited a customized version and using fine for few years.

dstillman · October 31, 2018

It looks like @adomasven removed support for 0.8 styles recently — not sure if there was any particular reason.

adamsmith · October 31, 2018

Thanks -- this is the 2nd report of this in a couple of days, so while I'm sure it's rare, it's not non-existent. Displaying a clearer error would be nice, I think.

"Styles with CSL version 0.8 are no longer supported. You can easily update your style."

or something along those lines

adomasven · October 31, 2018

I've reverted the commit for now. I removed it while working on some other bugfix and eliminating this as one possible source. I didn't see any reason to keep it then, but did not consider custom styles. We could write the updated 0.8 files to disk from Zotero, but the xslt transformer in Zotero loses whitespace, so the resulting stylesheets would be awful to work with if that was ever needed later down the line (which I guess isn't very likely, given these are unupdated 0.8 styles). And it's not easy to make this work nicely with a prompt. We cannot have hyperlinks in the text, and we'd have to include the path to the offending style, which would disappear after you clicked the "See update instructions" button. We'll probably be able to provide better upgrade UX in electron.

Rintze · October 31, 2018

"the xslt transformer in Zotero loses whitespace, so the resulting stylesheets would be awful to work with if that was ever needed later down the line"

Well, there is always https://formatter.citationstyles.org/ to restore proper indenting. And the JavaScript code that does the reformatting is reasonably well isolated (https://github.com/citation-style-language/formatter/tree/gh-pages/libraries), so you could even contemplate incorporating it into Zotero if you wanted to.