Best practices: Chicago Manual of Style citations

[Robert Salm]

Hi all. Curious if others use the Freeform citation to enter citations based on various publication styles (MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, Turabian, et al)? I currently use the Chicago Manual of Style's guide for different kinds of citations. Reunion's citation forms don't place parts of a citation in their proper order to begin with.

[Peter Sherman]

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're asking, but I use the free-form text field for my source citations. I've set up boilerplate pre-formatted text templates elsewhere in Reunion for the citation style I follow, bypassing the labelled source fields altogether. If I have a new source and an existing template for its type, I paste the template into the free-form field and replace the boilerplate, tweaking as needed for unusual cases. It's not always 100% as simple as I'm making it sound, but it works for me! (For what it's worth, I use Evidence Explained style - not everyone's cup of tea, but I like Elizabeth Shown Mill's rigorous approach.)

Having said that, you can arrange Reunion's source fields in any order you want, so I'm not sure in what way you're finding Reunion unable to do that for your sources.

[LindaCK]

Havng a feature that takes the fields and arranges them in MLA style would be a really excellent improvement!

[Robert Salm]

Thanks for the suggestions! Here's another. I get a "'LucidaGrande' does not support italic text, but when I go to Source Settings>Source Fields>Book/Periodical, I'm able to italicize Lucida Grande there, and it shows up in the "Preview" section. Also, in the Free-Form Text area, it doesn't let me italicize it there either. Does anyone know why it gives italicizing errors?

[Peter Sherman]

I can't say why Lucida Grande can't be italicized in the free-form field. I really like that font, so as a workaround I downloaded Lucida Sans (available as a free font) and use that instead. There are a few subtle differences that I was hyperaware of at first, but not for long.

[KirkS]

As an aside, remember there are some excellent online tools for generating citations in a variety of styles. Zotero is my favorite because it there is a native macOS app in addition to the webapp. This allows me to save my database of citations on my local machine or cloud of my choosing.

Zotero, Free Open Source (FOSS): https://www.zotero.org/
Online web app: https://zbib.org/

Another popular online tool is Scribbr: https://www.scribbr.com/citation/generator/