Problem with formatting journal volume and issue numbers

[psychomachine]

Hi,

this may have been covered before in the forum, but the search provides no results as I am using "too frequent words"

This is the formatting instruction for journals that I am using:

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a (d) t, j, v(i): p-.

When a journal contains both the volume and the issue, there is no problem: entering 16(2) in the volume-issue field produces this:

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Haddad, Elie G. (2003) On Henry van de Velde’s ‘manuscript on onrnament’, Journal of Design History, 16(2): 119-38.

But if the journal has only volume and no issue, we have the following problem. If we put only 16 in the volume-issue field, we get:

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Haddad, Elie G. (2003) On Henry van de Velde’s ‘manuscript on onrnament’, Journal of Design History, 16119-38.

i.e. the volume is merged with the page number. And if we treat the volume as the issue number and put (16) in the volume-issue field, we get:

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Haddad, Elie G. (2003) On Henry van de Velde’s ‘manuscript on onrnament’, Journal of Design History, 16): 119-38.

Both are obviously wrong. What's the solution here?

All best,
Tench

[Jon]

Basically, you're asking how Bookends deals with empty fields. This is covered in detail in the User Guide (search for "missing fields" or "empty fields"). There are many ways to deal with this, but perhaps the one that is easiest to grasp is to use conditional groups:

a (d) t, j, {v(i)^v}: p-.

In this case, it means output volume(issue). But if either of those fields is empty, output volume. You could make it handle the case where volume is empty, too, with a third parameter after another ^.

Jon
Sonny Software

[psychomachine]

Thanks, Jon. That's brilliant.