Suppress final punctuation
When I am embedding footnote citations in a larger discussion, it would be nice if I could check an option in the "Add/Edit Citation" dialogue box that would allow me to suppress the final punctuation. That would allow me, for example, to say:
FIRST_CITATION; cf. SECOND_CITATION
without it automatically putting in a period before my semicolon.
FIRST_CITATION; cf. SECOND_CITATION
without it automatically putting in a period before my semicolon.
What I am asking for would also be helpful for citations inside of parentheses (where the final period would go after the close paren) and when following a citation with a comma and an explanatory note.
You can also use prefix/suffix for parentheses, which will put the period after the citaiton.
Other interpretive options are OPTION_1 (so CITATION1) or OPTION_2 (so CITATION2).
I can't suppress the period following CITATION1, even if I put the ) in the suffix box.
Your fix solved the vast majority of my problems, though.
Al-Ramahi, “Competing Rationalities,” 202; quoting Daniel G. Bates and Amal Rassam, Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East (Prentice Hall, 2001), 245.
The semicolon after 202 is my problem.
I’d say there is demand for what you’re suggesting, btw.!
Would still like to see that suppress button as a feature in main zotero.
I'll work on a pull request against the Zotero master for suppression of trailing punctuation. It involves a string of changes, and some additions to the UI; I'm not sure how it will be received by the development team, but the best way to find out will be to put the code forward.
If style-supplied terminal punctuation is also an issue, could you outline the context?
The reason being that if a user sets a citation delimiter in the prefix and then removes the first citation (out of two), the delimiter would make no sense.
Writing in that mode will not map well to author-date styles anyway, so it may be more comfortable to just create footnotes manually and insert citations into the text. That's the style of writing that led me to implement suppression of trailing punctuation in MLZ; otherwise, you have to choose between manually adding a terminal period to many cites, or manually removing it from many others.
So I think there is a use case for suppression of terminal punctuation; I'm just not sure whether most users would feel the added UI complexity is worth the candle. For MLZ, which has a growing user base in law, I decided that it was worth it.
That would probably turn out to be fragile, though; providing for the suppression of terminal punctuation, so that users can create footnotes manually and get the results they expect, seems like a simpler and more intuitive solution.
No one has ever complained about that, though, and it's probably not worth automating. Some authors might want to use a different transition, and some styles (looking at you, Bluebook) have a fixed list of "signals." Here's a link to a plugin I built to address the latter:
http://fbennett.github.io/bluebook-signals-for-zotero/
Details of the signals are given in Rule 27, at pages 83-90 of the Bluebook 10th edition (now known to be free of copyright, thanks to careful research by Christopher Sprigman at NYU). Read it and weep. :-)
It would be possible to write it by creating a footnote, then (1) inserting the first citation and (2) adding the parenthetical as a suffix, then (3) writing the explanatory note and quotation (i.e. from "This characterization"), followed by (4) the closing cite ... but something like this is easier to handle if the first citation can be inserted without terminal punctuation -- then it's just a run of text with a couple of one-click citation inserts.