Suppressing a ":" When No Pages Cited

[gguthrie]

The style guide for the book I am writing calls for parenthetical references. Some tools, like books and journal articles use ":" before page numbers, but others, life reference works, do not (so I don't think I can simply use the "common settings" tab for my issue). My question: how do I suppress the ":" in a book citation if I do not cite page numbers? My book citation is simply "a d:"

So, I need certain citations to drop the : when no page numbers are present, but I have some types of reference works that do not use the : at all.

Thanks.

George

[Jon]

If you're not citing any pages, don't use the @ at the end of the temporary citation information.

Jon
Sonny Software

[gguthrie]

Jon,

I did not use the @ but it still includes the ":" in the scanned reference. I have not used the "Common Settings" "before" Cited Pages for the ":" since I have some reference types that should not include a ":". I have had to build the : into the Field Order of the Custom Options. Would love a way around this, but I can do a search and replace on those references without pages listed. Any ideas?

Thanks for your help.

George

[ozean]

Couldn’t you solve this by creating an extra reference type for these texts (i.e. reference works)? Other than that you can of course use {xyz\…\} in your citations instead of the {xyz@…}-based constructions to work around this. (At least if I have understood the issue correctly…)

[Jon]

The colon should not be built into the format, that's a mistake. There are two solutions. Use literal text, as ozean suggested, with the backslash. The other is what I suggested in response to your email to tech support, put : in the Before field and override it in cases where it's not wanted with backslashes: {temp cite@\.\12} -- that would replace the : with a . for example.

Jon
Sonny Software

[gguthrie]

Thanks for the reply. Since I am at the end of the project, that last suggestion would involve overriding dozens of particular instances. I will just do a search and replace on the 2 dozen or so exceptions. Good learning experience and will check the details of a style guide VERY carefully in the future. Thanks again for your work.