"English" vs. "American" style punctuation

CSL Development
1

Does anyone on the list have an opinion or background on the following, a
subject related to a few recently discussed?

In American style punctuation, a period or comma goes inside a quotation
mark, even if logically it belongs outside. English style (and some
technical styles where the precision is important) allow leaving the
punctuation outside the quotation. American: “in the house.” English: “in
the house”.

It’s a pet peeve of mine that it’s very difficult to get Endnote to produce
a consistent American style, and in the Zotero Word plug-in I’m working on,
I’d like to correct this. (It’s difficult because the note usually gets laid
down before the user has indicated the subsequent punctuation.)

It looks like current CSL (at least that used in Zotero) uses American-style
punctuation.

Should I assume the following?

  • All the CSLs have been written American style.
  • This is not determined by a switch within a style’s definition. If you
    want English style, you create a new CSL. You don’t set a parameter in a
    current one.
  • What I’ve called English style is not a hard rule, and that what I’ve
    called American style is acceptable everywhere.

If that’s all true, then there would be an inconsistency if a word-processor
used an American-style CSL to produce a citation, but then English-style
around the citation. No?

It seems a word processor either needs to use current CSLs and figure out
the magic to get consistent American style, or get new English-style CSLs.

Do any word-processors do the first? Do any batch-oriented typesetting
tools?

Any leads on how I should be thinking about this would be appreciated.

John

2

CSL now contains (as per my demands) a “quotes” attribute, which
should eliminate the need for a separate style for American and
British users. While I’m not sure that all styles have been adapted
to use this attribute, it would not be difficult to do so.

The best solution, I suppose, would be to have a Zotero preference
controlling quote style, which is used when formatting citations, and
gets passed to the Word plug-in if necessary (perhaps in the response
to setDocPrefs). If you see any problem with this, let me know.

Simon

3

I pretty much agree with what Simon said. Ideally this is a config
option somewhere (not exactly sure where), and that one not create
special us-gb styles. CSL styles are supposed to be be
language-independent, and we need to figure out how to maintain that
after we made the decision to go down that road.

Also …

It’s a pet peeve of mine that it’s very difficult to get Endnote to
produce a consistent American style, and in the Zotero Word plug-in
I’m working on, I’d like to correct this.

I like this attitude!

…

Do any word-processors do the first? Do any batch-oriented typesetting
tools?

You could look into the TeX world, except that BibTeX generally has
poor support for the humanities and note-style citations. Maybe
something like Jurabib? There was also another new package explicitly
for note-style citations, but I forget the name at the moment.

Bruce

4

Thanks Simon and Bruce. That all sounds good, and I’ll proceed on the plugin
on the assumption that at some point, on the Zotero side, the right CSLs
will get used (if they are not there already) and the preference will get
added as you suggest.

John