Abbreviations for page ranges

CSL Usage
1

Some styles in German speaking academia use suffixes for indicating page ranges:

200 f. => 200-201
200 ff. => open ended page range beginning at p. 200

Is there a way to achieve this in CSL at the moment? The attribute page-range-format at cs:style does not seem to support this, and I have not found something related in the specs.

2

No it’s not. I don’t think we’ll bother supporting it. As far as I know, they’re not used for page ranges the bibliography, just for locators. There, they can be achieved using suffixes, which works fine. It’s not convertible, but I think that’s fine (and in particular ff. should be on its way out, even in Germany).

3

I totally agree; ff. is not particularly useful for the reader. But I am not to decide here. Anyway, the suggestion to use the suffix for this should be fine.

4

I actually mean “should” in the sense of “as far as I know it is” – most style guides have started discouraging it, including in Germany. Cf. for example the German Wikipedia entry on this:

Während in älteren wissenschaftlichen Publikationen, in denen z. T. geringere Ansprüche an die Exaktheit von Nachweisen gestellt wurden, die Angabe mittels „ff.“ üblich war (neben anderen veralteten Nachweisangaben wie „a. a. O.“ oder „op. cit“), wird von ihrem Gebrauch u. a. in geisteswissenschaftlichen Arbeiten heute meist abgeraten. Stattdessen wird in der Regel empfohlen, eine exakte Erstreckung von Seiten, Paragraphen, Daten etc. anzugeben: statt „vgl. S. 139 ff.“ also z. B. „vgl. S. 139–145“.

5

Absolutely, your right. It’s getting less and less popular, and that’s not bad at all, especially for ff.
Yet, this as well is one of those cases where they deliberately chose to deviate from APA.

6

Just came up in a style I’m reviewing – you can actually get ff. for page ranges from the page variable simply by using <text variable="page-first" suffix=" ff."/>. No way to distinguish between f and ff in that context, but just f should be quite rare I imagine.

7

This may just be adding noise to the discussion, but there’s a thing I hacked into CSL-M that allows content to be embedded in a term. If that form is required everywhere for pages, I guess that with that it could be expressed like this:

<term name="page">
    <single>%s&#160;f.</single>
    <multiple>%s&#160;ff.</multiple>
</term>

(only if it’s not a form optionally chosen by the document author though)

8

Are you sure this will give us the required output? I think I should actually need three variants:
Single: one page number
Double: page number + f.
Multiple: page number + ff.

(But this won’t be usable with regular Zotero, right? I don’t think I can convince them to use Juris-M.)

9

By simply using what? Looks like there is something missing in your post.

10

Not with regular Zotero, no; and it wouldn’t increment in three steps that way - just singular or plural. So not a solution.

11

sorry, post is updated