Sonny Software

Hi, I've been using Bookends for a few months and I really like it. Unfortunately there are no French citation styles so far, and I plan to make a very general one for Humanities, that could be easily tweaked depending on the journals, anyone interested? I'll share mine and perhaps we can help each other, I still have hard times mastering the "empty fields" options, even with the guide.

If you have specific formats we'd be happy to include them with the distribution (we already do that for some foreign formats). As for dealing with empty fields, I recommend 2 approaches:

1. Use spaces and $ (quote marks). For example, if the editors field is empty the text prior to it won't be output:

$edited by $e

(note that the space before the e is *inside* of the quote.

2. Conditional groups is very powerful, and often works when other approaches fail. Tell Bookends what to output in the order of preference. The first "group" in which all elements have content will be output

{a, t (d)^a (d)^}

The ^ at the end means output nothing if the first two options fail.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks for the feedback, Jon, I'm still exploring the conditional groups possibilities. One of the concerns I had, but it has nothing to do with a French version, is to decide whether translated books should not be a new and independent category, it's seems easier to include then all the required fields than to nest them into conditional groups in a regular reference, which may be translated, or not.

It's actually easy to do even without conditional groups. Something like this (untested), where u9 is the Transl. Auth field:

a, $Translated by $u9*. t.

If there is nothing in the u9 field, you get this

Smith, A, My article.

otherwise

Smith, A, Translated by Jones, TR. My article.

(the asterisk after u9 means that the contents of the field should be treated as a name).

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks again, Jon, this is really helpful; I think conditional groups are quite powerful here.
One last question   : let's say I'd want to prefix, before the conditional group, something like $Original publication$ or any string of text that should show up _only if_ there's something in the conditional group, and would be skipped if there's nothing, what would be the good syntax?
(The reason for this  : putting the reference to the original whenever I quote a translation, the conditional group would then include the original version, using u10, u11, etc, but of course this should be skipped when it's not a translation)

Anything, including literal text, can be included in a conditional group.

{$Original publicaton: $u11^$Something else$}

Jon
Sonny Software

Excellent, works perfectly!!

If anyone is interested, this works perfectly for the following
Either I have the translator, the original title, the original publisher, the original date
Or just the translator, the original title and the original date
Or just the original date in some cases
I need Bookends to check that in that order, and the instructions provided by Jon work like a charm since the short text strings I add will not be the same in each case.

Hi,
Has this specific French format been incorporated in the app    ? If it has, under what name   ? Thanks