How do I get rid of the terminal period?

dclarke
I find Zotero's insistence on telling me what punctuation should follow my cite to be very irritating. All I want is the cite in proper format. According to this discussion (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1956/) it seems the Zotero developers used to agree with that approach, but have since changed it. Is there some simple way to get Zotero just to stop putting in the final period? The various workarounds involving the suffix field don't work for all purposes.
  • adamsmith
    The linked thread (in which all devs involved always agreed the period should be there) describes how to change the behavior by changing the citation style. That's the only available option
  • dclarke
    edited July 29, 2024
    In the linked thread, the original poster complained that Zotero was NOT putting in a terminal period. "dmichon" then said, "This is NOT an error." He/she noted that "there many situations where you don't want a period, but a comma, or a semi-colon, or nothing at all". In any case, regardless of the history, the current configuration doesn't work for me.

    I saw your note in that thread where you said:

    change
    <layout prefix="" suffix="." delimiter="; ">

    to
    <layout prefix="" suffix="" delimiter="; ">

    I also read the instructions on style editing for which you attached the link. I appreciate your taking the time to help out. But unfortunately after trying I still need some guidance. I don't know where to find this <layout prefix... language. Is it supposed to be in each individual style, so that I need to edit all those I might want to use? I am trying to edit OSCOLA style, and could not find <layout prefix> language anywhere in the style. (I downloaded it, opened it in Notepad, and did a search.) Thus, I still don't know how to remove the terminal period.

    Many thanks for any further help you can offer.
  • dclarke
    Sorry, everything I put in angle brackets got suppressed in the above comment. I didn't realize the system did that. Let me try again.

    You suggested some changes in a series of instructions beginning with the words "layout prefix". I could not find those words in the OSCOLA style definition file and so am wondering if they are somewhere else, outside of the individual style definitions, and if so, where.
  • damnation
    Any style will have a maximum of two "layout" lines.
    The first one is within a block called "citation", the other for "bibliography".
    These sections render the citations and the bib. Crazy naming, I know.
    Wherever you want that dot to disappear, look for a suffix. Delete that. You're done.
  • dclarke
    I think I just found it by searching only for "suffix". Problem solved, I think.
  • dclarke
    Thanks!
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