Can one append discursive notes to a citation?

I often use CMS 17th edition (full note) style and have tried Turabian 8th ed. (full note) style. Neither of the styles seems to allow for appending discursive notes to the end of the generated citation. This is something that I often need to do. Is it a major job to modify a style to allow this? The Extras field is present in both and likely would do the job, except it does not print in the citations and bibliographies for either style.

I'm a real novice at using Zotero, so please take this into account when responding.
  • You'd just use the suffix field for short-medium length discursive notes.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage
    For longer notes, create the footnote in Word, insert the citation, and the just write in the footnote (note that punctuation may be a bit tricky in this latter case, so you may need to use the suffix until you get to the end of the next sentence or so.
  • Thank you, Adam.

    The use of the suffix helps me a bit, but it is not quite what I hoped to find.

    I have a standard block of text for a specific document and was hoping to store it with the citation in Zotero and have Zotero automatically append it. This approach allows me to append it, but I still need to manually access, copy, and paste what I already have stored in the entry in Zotero.

    Does using the suffix invalidate the autoupdate feature for the citation or is that only affected when I actually edit the citation?

    If anything else comes to mind, please let me know.
  • edited October 24, 2020
    There are workarounds (storing it in Extra or in Extra preceded by annote: and using a custom citation style), but nothing built in.
    Does using the suffix invalidate the autoupdate feature for the citation or is that only affected when I actually edit the citation?
    No it doesn't. That's its big advantage (since the input is well defined, Zotero can keep updating the citation and the just apply the same suffix to the updated one).
  • Thanks, Adam. I think one add the Extra field by using the same method as one would use to add the Call Number field in a customized style. Saw that done on the forum posts, I think.
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