# French styles: quotes="true" versus prefix/suffix

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [July 3, 2012, 12:38am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111 "2012-07-03T00:38:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Bennett1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d2c977/32.png) [@Frank\_Bennett1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Frank_Bennett1)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 12:38am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111/1 "2012-07-03T00:38:25Z")

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I’ve been working with a user on enhancements to multilingual support  
in MLZ. The target format is something like this:

Smith, J. [« Hinode » 日の出 (Sunrise)], Good Books Press (2000).

(Square braces added) The stuff inside the square braces is a single  
field for the “title” variable, made up of three elements: a  
transliteration, the original text, and a translation. Each element  
attracts different affixes, and is composed automatically by the  
processor. This is meant to work with a standard style, without any  
special markup in CSL to support multilingual cites.

We’ve discovered that a number of repo styles that are in the fr-FR  
domain (or should be) apply quotes with prefix/suffix attributes. This  
makes it impossible to control the application of the suffix to the  
cs:text node that renders the title from the quotes in which it is  
meant to be enclosed, so the processor issues something like this  
(chopping off the closing quotation mark):

Smith, J. [« Hinode 日の出 (Sunrise)], Good Books Press (2000).

I would like to change all of these styles to use quotes="true"  
instead, if there is concensus that this would make sense. I can’t see  
any downside.

Here are the styles that would be affected:

annales.csl  
french1.csl  
french2.csl  
french3.csl  
french4.csl  
geneses.csl  
histoire-at-politique.csl  
histoire-et-mesure.csl  
invisu.csl  
le-mouvement-social.csl  
lettres-et-sciences-humaines-fr.csl  
mcrj7.csl  
presses-universitaires-de-rennes.csl  
revue-dhistoire-moderne-et-contemporaine.csl  
traces.csl  
universite-de-liege-histoire.csl  
universite-laval-com.csl  
vingtieme-siecle.csl

Frank

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 12:41am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111/2 "2012-07-03T00:41:54Z")

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absolutely. These are csl 0.8 relics (and then people editing  
auto-converted styles in csl 1.0) - quotes should never be hard coded,  
so yes, please do change it.  
Cf. also this on twitter today, same problem:  
[https://twitter.com/JocelynM85/status/219893736413462532](https://twitter.com/JocelynM85/status/219893736413462532)

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**Author:** ![Frank\_Bennett](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/frank_bennett/32/198_2.png) [@Frank\_Bennett](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Frank_Bennett)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 1:31am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111/3 "2012-07-03T01:31:52Z")

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Pull request now up, from quotes-fix branch on citation-style-language repo.

Frank

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Frank\_Bennett](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/frank_bennett/32/198_2.png) [@Frank\_Bennett](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Frank_Bennett)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 1:47am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111/4 "2012-07-03T01:47:09Z")

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Frank\_Bennett](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/frank_bennett/32/198_2.png) [@Frank\_Bennett](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Frank_Bennett)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 1:48am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/french-styles-quotes-true-versus-prefix-suffix/1111/5 "2012-07-03T01:48:08Z")

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Or not. Thanks for that!

Frank