Hi there,

I'm trying to create/modify a style to work according to the guidelines of a publication series published by my institute. The guidelines state that all citations must be in footnotes (not a problem) and employ ibid., where cites following one another refer to the same item. This is where it gets tricky.
My problem specifically is to get the style to function properly according to ibid/ibid-with-locator specifics, when the two cites are separated by a commenting footnote that does not contain a citation, something like this:

1) Abaelardus, Dialectica, pp. 5-7.
2) Ibid., p. 33.
3) Ibid.
4) That means bla bla bla
5) Ibid., p. 3-4.

I thought the way forward was to nest ibid/ibid-with-locator within near-note (I added near-note-distance="5" at the beginning of the citation section). My first attempt was as follows:


<if position="near-note">
<choose>
<if position="ibid-with-locator">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text term="ibid"/>
<text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
</group>
</if>
<else-if position="ibid">
<text term="ibid"/>
</else-if>
</choose>
</if>


This didn't work, yielding [CSL STYLE ERROR: reference with no printed form.] whenever the two notes are not immediately adjacent. I kinda understand why that happens (since position=ibid/ibid-with-locator only look the immediately preceding not, I guess, but how do I solve this?
If I add lines of position=subsequent, I could of course set the text term as ibid, etc., like adding the following lines of the section of "position=ibid"":


<else-if position="subsequent">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text term="ibid"/>
<text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
</group>
</else-if>


This works insofar as it "writes" ibid. up until a distance of notes. But how can I then make distinctions, depending on whether the cite has a locator being identical or different from the preceding citation or doesn't have any locator at all? Plus, it doesn't work when there is a note containing a different citation. Nesting "position="near-note"" within the ibid/ibid-with-locator section doesn't work either.
So how can I make ibid/ibid-with-locator work together with near-note-distance=5 correctly, so that there can be commenting footnotes between two citations and ibid still working, but any intervening different citation triggering subsequent rules?

Many thanks in advance!

Daniel