Punctuation moved inside quotes - undocumented?

jmnc
I've noticed that for text elements, punctuation such as commas and
periods specified as group suffixes or delimiters are moved inside quotes when the
attribute quotes="true"

This behaviour is not documented anywhere, even in the CSL schema.
My question is, what are the rules applied for moving punctuation inside quotes,
and is any text other than punctuations ever moved?
  • fbennett
    @jmnc,

    Hi, I'm (another user and) working on a new citation formatting module (CSL processor) for Zotero. I'm not sure about the existing processor, but I'd be very interested to learn how quotes and punctuation should be handled. Currently, my own processor would place punctuation outside quotation marks. This seems like sensible behavior to me, and could be overridden by placing a group around the field, and putting the quotes attribute on the group (and the affixes with punctuation on the text element inside it). But if that seems undesirable, please let me know.
  • bdarcus
    edited June 17, 2009
    It's not documented, but how punctuation is handled WRT to quotes is locale-specific. In US English, punctuation is moved within the closing quotation mark. With the British English, it shouldn't. Not sure about other locales.

    This needs to be documented along with the larger cleanup of quote-handling (it's localization). It also needs to be configured in the locales files I think.

    Frank, we need a test case for this, as it's an important feature.
  • fbennett
    edited June 17, 2009
    Bruce,

    Indeed. First I've heard of this. I'll fix the code when I see the tests.

    EDIT: I also see that there ... seems to be no British English locale yet.
  • bdarcus
    edited June 17, 2009
    I added one, but you need to fix the result to have proper quote marks (I can't figure out how to add them on this machine ATM).

    BTW, it's generally a bad idea to be including automatically generated files in the SCM. We might reconsider requiring the machine/human separation. Seems the only reason we do this is b/c we're shoe-honing XML into the JSON, and that if we just stored the CSL separately we wouldn't need to?
  • fbennett
    I removed the json area from version control back when they were housed with citeproc-js, then added it back because Sean ran into encoding issues on the Mac, the source of which was initially unclear. That has been sorted, plus the grinder is now python-based and likely more robust. So yes, probably the files could be removed. Please liaise with Sean or at least test the grind/test cycle in a Mac environment. If it works, go ahead and remove them.
  • fbennett
    Re proper quotes, the tests are HTML, quotes are expressed as entities.

    The tests should be kept in single files. It would be annoying to have to scratch around in parallel filesystem hierarchies when writing, editing or interpreting tests (I've written about eighty of them so far, but we'll need five or six times that number eventually, so ease of editing is important).
  • jmnc
    Hi guys,

    I'm not sure that quotes are just a locale issue. I'm British, and opinion on the placement of punctuation inside quotes is highly divided. Many academics prefer punctuation to be outside the quotes, unless it was part of an actual quoted sentence, others do not. The 'average' British writer would move any punctuation inside quotes, but it is not a rule as such. The desired quote style should probably be part of the CSL file, as it is specified by the Journals, and I have no doubt that there will be some British journals using the 'US' quote style.
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