Hi Julian,
I completely understand your reluctance to disturb a bibliographic setup
that is already working well, especially when only a small number of
references require a more specialized treatment.
I use specifications such as APA or Chicago myself, and I think they are
very good tools for ordinary bibliographic work. But I would still
encourage you, when you have the opportunity, to experiment with
|context-sbl|.
SBL becomes particularly useful when bibliography and citation move into
more heavily scholarly territory: several editions of the same work,
multivolume editions, collected works, ancient or patristic texts,
canonical or conventional locators, and so on. In such cases, references
often need to remain independent of the pagination of a particular
modern edition.
This is precisely the sort of situation we encounter with Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, the Church Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, and many
others, where established systems such as Stephanus or Bekker numbering
— or other canonical forms of reference — are often more useful than
ordinary page locators.
So when a text really does contain a “myriad” of references, as is often
the case in substantial academic or editorial work, and particularly
when non-Latin scripts and several editions or languages have to
coexist, SBL is worth considering.
Joe McCollum has done a remarkable job in making the SBL specification
work in ConTeXt. There are still a few corners that could be improved,
but it already handles a surprisingly wide range of scholarly citation
problems very well.
And thank you very much for your kind words about the Garden pages. I’m
especially pleased that you find the bibliography and TEI material
useful. The bibliography material has now indeed grown into a
substantial ANSS-CE draft, so feedback from real use cases such as yours
is particularly valuable.
Best,
JP
Le 17/08/2026 à 00:31, jbf a écrit :
Yes, JP, as expected,
\cite
[alternative=authoryear,
righttext={X.33.50}]
[main::augustine1991confessions]
does exactly as you said and as I hoped. Amongst the myriad of
citations in the text I am dealing with there is just a small handful
relating to the /Confessions/, so I was eager not to do anything too
dramatic with the bibliography scheme that otherwise is working well
for this text. I had searched around and tried the older (mkii I
think) approach using extras=, but that was not getting me anywhere.
'righttext' is what I needed!
So thanks once again for this very useful solution. Your work in the
'Garden' in this referencing area (and, I might also add on TEI
critical editing) is very valuable and deserves a wide readership.
Glad to know it will find its way into ANSS-CE.
Julian
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