Punctuation in references

[Michael Bywater]

With some of the punctuation tweaks in the latest release, I wonder if it's time to petition for another one.

I work in humanities and we largely use MHRA style, or a subset of it. In common with a lot of styles, it requires publication data as

City: Publisher, Date

If (as often happens, esp. with older texts) we only know City *or* Publisher, we get:

Publisher, Date (which is fine) or
City: Date (which isn't fine, and which should be "City, Date", so that I have to do a lot of tedious manual fiddling.

I wonder if there's any way round this -- short of EndNote (ick) style "forced separators".

The other punctuation problem is parentheses. I am parentheses' bitch, to be frank. But this isn't (yet) the place for that, unless anyone else is parentheses' bitch, too...

[Jon]

Hi Michael,

I wonder if this can't be handled with the current formatting rules (using $ or ` as "quote" symbols). You can send me the format you use and a small db (compressed) with a few entries that illustrate the problem. And of course, send me what you would like the output to be...

Jon
Sonny Software