I’m still struggling trying to format these for some of the styles (3rd
edition, edition 3, 3rd ed., 3 etc), so here are some ideas on a way
forward.
I think we need to be able to treat them either as text or numbers. Text for
backwards compatibility and where you don’t care about the format too much.
The most radical idea is to introduce a new formatting construct, that
emulates text to a degree.
So where you can have
you could instead do it with something like
to get something like 3rd
The form should also probably include roman (i,ii, iii), numeric(1,2,3),
ordinal and possibly others.
In zotero, this would pick out the number component of the edition field
with a regexp, and format that.
So from “3rd ed.” “edition 3” it would match 3, and then you can format that
how you like. It might be possible to detect roman numerals too for extra
credit.
This could be tested with to test if there was a
number in there, and so allow just text as an alternative.
The same can apply to the chapter and volume numbers and any other fields
that can be possible purely numeric.
Alternatives would be to overload the current text with some more of these
formatting constructs, but it feels slightly cleaner to have a separate
number as then you can also specify which variables the number directive and
formatting are reasonable to apply to (volume, number, chapter,
no-of-volumes, edition etc).
A possible more complex way would be to structure like names and dates, with
something like
which would allow appropriate labels to be attached to things. That might be
a step too far though.
Thoughts?
Julian.