Sonny Software

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 My question: how do I suppress the ":" in a book citation if I do not cite page numbers?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

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

Jon
Sonny Software

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

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…)

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

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.