On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Franziska Heimburger
<[email protected]> wrote:
> has anyone ever held a similar initiative?

I'm not aware of any. Sebastian (adamsmith) interacts with a lot of
Zotero users via the Zotero forums, and Charles Parnot offers support
to users of Papers (Mekentosj, the makers of Papers, also has a
program to reward people to contribute styles:
http://news.mekentosj.com/2012/01/a-serial-for-a-style/ ).

> What guidelines for good csl-practice would you want to teach a bunch of
> beginners?

We have a set of requirements for styles that are submitted to the
official style repository (see
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Style-Requirements
), although those mostly concern the style metadata and style
validation. Sebastian might have some additional tips on coding the
actual styles, but one relatively recent development is that we try
to rely much more on the cs:group element to specify delimiting
punctuation and whitespace. This prevents superfluous punctuation in
case not all metadata is present (see an example at
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/21068/extra-comma-in-apa-style-letter-or-memorandum/?Focus=133780#Comment_133780
).

Other than that, I've started some work to rewrite the CSL Primer
(http://citationstyles.org/downloads/primer.html). It's a work in
progress, but there is some new material that might be useful as an
introduction to CSL at
http://citation-style-language.readthedocs.org/en/latest/primer.html
(as an aside: I've been suffering a bit from a writer's block; if
anybody has any topics they feel should be addressed in the CSL
primer, let me know).

> finally, more specifically, when writing French styles, I got used to
> including codes like &#160; for non-breaking spaces and &#232; for è - in
> good part because I got tired of people opening/saving styles on different
> operating systems and breaking accented character encodings. I remember that
> being discouraged at some point on this list. What are people's opinions on
> this?

I think escape codes make a lot of sense for those cases where a style
author cannot (easily) visually identify a character, as is e.g. the
case for a non-breaking space. Every now and then I reindent the
styles in the style repository, and the code I use automatically
unescapes these codes. The characters that I re-escape can be found at
https://github.com/citation-style-language/utilities/blob/master/csl-indent.py#L30
(currently the "no-break space", "non-breaking hyphen", "en-dash",
"em-dash", and a superscript "e" that didn't render properly on my
system). I can easily add more, but I don't think we need to escape
relatively common characters such as "è", or characters that should
render just fine in any modern plain text editor, like French
quotation marks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet).

Rintze

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