bug report: editing chicago style bibliography

[jadecricket]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel know folks have had problems with the bibliography tools in microsoft word, but after figuring out some of initial weirdness of them, i have found them on the whole to be an incredible time saver.

have, however, located a problem.

when i insert (e.g. Jobs 1998) a chicago-style citation into the document, i can edit the citation to suppress the author year, title, or add a page number. if i simply add a page number, (e.g. Jobs 1998, 2), it works great. however, a lot of people suppress the author in their citations because he/she is already mentioned in the same sentence and it avoids redundancy, e.g. "When Jobs introduced the iMac he claimed it was really cool (1998, 2). what word 2008 does, however, when the author is suppressed but the page and year of the citation remains, is remove the space and comma. so it looks like: (19982). this is an unacceptable citation.

the only way i can change this is by first converting the citation to static text. this is a workable solution, but it would be nice if microsoft could fix this little bug so the citations can remain active in the document.

anyone else experience this?

 

[John McGhie]

This is not the place for bug reports (because the only people reading this
are fellow users, not people who can fix bugs).

Use Help>Send Feedback to open the bug reporting web page and copy your post
in there: tat sends it off to the Microsoft product development team. If
you choose not to do that, Microsoft will never see what you wrote.

Cheers

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel
know folks have had problems with the bibliography tools in microsoft word,
but after figuring out some of initial weirdness of them, i have found them on
the whole to be an incredible time saver.

have, however, located a problem.

when i insert (e.g. Jobs 1998) a chicago-style citation into the document, i
can edit the citation to suppress the author year, title, or add a page
number. if i simply add a page number, (e.g. Jobs 1998, 2), it works great.
however, a lot of people suppress the author in their citations because he/she
is already mentioned in the same sentence and it avoids redundancy, e.g. "When
Jobs introduced the iMac he claimed it was really cool (1998, 2). what word
2008 does, however, when the author is suppressed but the page and year of the
citation remains, is remove the space and comma. so it looks like: (19982).
this is an unacceptable citation.

the only way i can change this is by first converting the citation to static
text. this is a workable solution, but it would be nice if microsoft could fix
this little bug so the citations can remain active in the document.

anyone else experience this?

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

--

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Yves Dhondt]

Yes. It is a known bug which also exists in Word 2007 for Windows. Luckely it is a bug that you can fix yourself.

In Finder, select 'Go' -> 'Applications'. Click 'Microsoft Office 2008'. Right click on 'Microsoft Word' and choose 'Show Packet Contents'. Then browse through the directories 'Contents', 'Resources', and 'Style'. You will end up in a map containing a couple of XSL files. Look for Chicago.XSL. The following step is really important:

CREATE A BACKUP OF THIS FILE IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG

Open the original Chicago.XSL using TextEdit. Search for the following 2 lines:

<xsl:if test="string-length($volume) > 0 or string-length($pages) > 0">
<xsl:if test="string-length($displayAuthor) > 0 or string-length($displayTitle) > 0">

and replace the second line by

<xsl:if test="string-length($displayAuthor) > 0 or string-length($displayTitle) > 0 or string-length($year) > 0">

Save the file. Restart Word and try it.

HTH

Yves
--
BibWord : Microsoft Word Citation and Bibliography styles
http://bibword.codeplex.com

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel know folks have had problems with the bibliography tools in microsoft word, but after figuring out some of initial weirdness of them, i have found them on the whole to be an incredible time saver.

have, however, located a problem.

when i insert (e.g. Jobs 1998) a chicago-style citation into the document, i can edit the citation to suppress the author year, title, or add a page number. if i simply add a page number, (e.g. Jobs 1998, 2), it works great. however, a lot of people suppress the author in their citations because he/she is already mentioned in the same sentence and it avoids redundancy, e.g. "When Jobs introduced the iMac he claimed it was really cool (1998, 2). what word 2008 does, however, when the author is suppressed but the page and year of the citation remains, is remove the space and comma. so it looks like: (19982). this is an unacceptable citation.

the only way i can change this is by first converting the citation to static text. this is a workable solution, but it would be nice if microsoft could fix this little bug so the citations can remain active in the document.

anyone else experience this?