Suppress period at end of citation?

Is it possible to force Zotero to not end a citation with a period (in styles where this is automatically added to the footnote)?
  • No, you can only edit the style or use similar style without the period on the end. What style do you mean?
  • And what is the specific example of a citation you are trying to create?
  • It is my own style, but the period needs to stay there as the rule. However, occasionally one wants to put two citations into one longer sentence, and it is a bit of a hassle to write the sentence into the prefix and suffix fields. But no worries, not an important thing at all, Just thought I ask anyway.
  • Yeah, generally for any sort of annotation like this, you want to use prefix/suffix. That will prevent any sort of unexpected behavior or automatic text changes/loss. It is helpful if you are writing a long annotation to type it in Word first, then cut/paste into the prefix/suffix field.
  • Would this be a technically possible solution (for footnotes and endnotes, at least)?

    1. If one uses Zotero to create the footnote/endnote (via Zotero plugin command Add/Edit Citation, while cursor is within the main document text), then one should use Zotero's prefix and suffix fields for any commentary, and Zotero adds the proper end punctuation for each citation (even with multiple sources in one).

    2. If one uses Word to create the footnote/endnote (via Word's Insert Footnote command, while cursor is in the main document text), writes the commentary content of that footnote/endnote, and then inserts one or more Zotero citations into the commentary of that footnote/endnote, then Zotero does not add any end punctuation at all. It's up to the author to add any desired punctuation in the Word commentary of the footnote, or perhaps in the suffix fields of the Zotero citations, (rather than manually editing the citation, which would break updating).

    Is this possible? Depends on how the style definition and Zotero Word plugin interact, presumably.

    Alternatively, allow a "suppress end punctuation" check box in the Zotero Word plug-in dialogue (akin to the "suppress author") dialogue, which would make this very flexible.

    Thank you for consideration.
  • Zotero citations do not have awareness of the document text around them in that way, no. For note styles, Zotero just tells Word “inset a note here” and then adds its citation fields to that note. If you want to edit text associated with a citation and have it continue to be automatically updated and formatted, you need to use the prefix/suffix fields
  • @bwiernik Thank you for the comment. I thought that might be the case.

    Is is possible to add the "suppress end punctuation" option to the Zotero plugin dialogue box, alongside the "suppress author" option?
  • I agree that this would be an extremely useful feature. I thought I had managed to solve the issue by editing the style, only to find to my dismay that when editing on a different computer (desktop at home rather than work laptop) periods (full stops) were being added in so that in many places there were now two.
  • I mean -you'd just have to use the same, edited style on all machines (make sure to change the style id)
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