Release Announcements

Frank Bennett

v1.1.113

Fix bug in logging code introduced at 1.1.111
Minutes after a Juris-M release incorporating the changes below, a colleague knocked on my door to say that word processor input had suddenly broken. We traced the cause to entries with an invalid language code (“Japanese” rather than “ja”), which should have logged a warning without throwing an error. The cause was a typo in the logging function itself (a missing argument in the signature). Now fixed, and things should work normally.

v1.1.112

Fix Homer-worthy nesting bug
A research group (at Heidelberg University) had been getting persistent errors when attempting to generate multilingual bibliographies. The fault was traced to a clear coding error in the code used to output tertiary variants (i.e. the second of two variants to a cite field value). The fault has been fixed, and multilingual bibliographies in all configurations should now render without error.

v1.1.111

Use dump rather than throw if console not available
Previously, the CSL.error() function would throw a hard (crashing) error on systems that did not have a native console.log() function with the expected characteristics (hello Windows). With this fix, the code falls back to the more primitive dump() logging function, avoiding a crash. (Note that there was a bug in this fix, repaired at 1.1.113)

v1.1.110

Wrap section field remap in condition
For legal item types in CSL-M styles, the section field is remapped to locator, the allow storage of individual statutory sections as separate items in the database. This behaviour is not desired in standard CSL, but was not properly disabled. With the addition of a conditional, remapping is now properly disabled in vanilla CSL.

v1.1.109

Fix sorting behaviour
Sort comparisons in JavaScript engines are (still) producing inconsistent results. This fix tests the effect of separator strings hacked into processor-generated sort keys, choosing the separating character (at-mark @ or field-separator |) that will produce a correct sort. Tests prepared in response to the relevant bug report (from a user with Danish requirements) now pass, and existing sort tests also clear.

v1.1.108

Remove indexOf() definition
Modern JavaScript engines all have indexOf() as a native method on Array(), so this workaround is no longer necessary.
Show institution name variants even when abbrev is used
Previously, when the short form of an institution name was used, its variants were not displayed, even in the first reference. With this change, variants are displayed. Some further tuning may be in order here, since institution names have differing roles for courts and for “proper” institutional authors, but we will pick up those use cases as they emerge over time.

v1.1.107

Add default-locale to cs-date
Previously, in multi-layout styles, the default-locale form of dates as always used for the accessed date variable, and the localized form was used on all other date variables. The use of default locale can now be controlled in the same way as for cs:label and cs:text.

v1.1.106

Avoid array comprehensions
On line of processor code depended on a form of assignment that is apparently not supported in some JavaScript implementations. This has been fixed.
New default-locale attribute for cs:label, cs:text
In multi-layout styles, there was no way to force use of the default-locale version of specific terms. With default-locale="true" on cs:label and cs:text this is now possible.

v1.1.105

Extend use of en-dash on locator labels
An en-dash was used for hyphen only on a limited subset of labels. It is generally the right thing to do, so its use has been extended.

v1.1.104

Split Institution field

Fix locator-date and locator-extra bugs
The locator-date and locator-extra variables that depend on content parsed out of the locator field were not updating correctly in dynamic environments. This has been fixed.
Fix bugs in new year-suffix code from 1.1.100
The fix at 1.1.100 introduced fresh bugs in year-suffix disambiguation. These have been squashed.

v1.1.103

Title-case capitalization following forward slash
With text-case="title" in an English locale, capitalize a word that follows a forward slash.
Escape sup and sub tags when capitalizing
Properly escape <sup></sup> and <sub></sub> markup when applying text transforms (fixes a bug unmasked by the change above).
Use title as fallback for citation-label
When no authors are available for citation-label, use a fragment of the title.
Strip font style and weight in multilingual variants
When adding multilingual variants in output, suppress italics, oblique, and boldface in supplementary (secondary and tertiary) text.

v1.1.102

Include citationID in return from processCitationCluster()

This is a technical change, with no impact at user level.

While building a small demo of dynamic citation editing is a Web-based WYSIWYG editor, I found that including the value of citationID in the return from the processCitationCluster() function greatly simplified page updates following a citation edit, so I added that value to the return.

v1.1.101

Delimiter bug with year-suffix
Certain delimiters were being dropped when rendering an explicit year-suffix element (a numeric value rendered as a string). This has been fixed.

Stray year-suffix bug

In a bug related to the one above, and apparently triggered by changes in 1.1.100, an implicit year-suffix was rendering on dates with empty variables.

This has been fixed.

v1.1.100

Non-breaking-space joins following initials

Retain zero-width non-breaking space (\uFEFF) and non-breaking space (\u00A0) as the inter-initials join when these are the last character in the @initialize-with attribute value.

In the RU (Russian), CS (Czech) and FR (French) locales only, when either of the non-breaking space elements is present in the attribute value, use non-breaking space (\u00A0) as the given-to-family join when building initialized names in non-sort order. Otherwise, use an ordinary space for the given-to-family join.

Resolves the issue discussed at:

NB: This behaviour was added for the CS locale at later tag 1.1.103.

Date styling bug
The affixes of a cs:date node with no variable content could affect the styling of subsequent date nodes. This has been fixed.
Bug in year-suffix
The year-suffix form of disambiguation was misbehaving when used with collapse="year" or collapse="year-suffix". This has been fixed.

v1.1.99

Fix pluralism of embedded labels
Shortcode labels that differ from the “main” label on a number (as in “p. 123 n. 1 & 2”) were not pluralizing properly. This has been fixed.

v1.1.98

Expose parseNoteFieldHacks()
To allow small extensions to the schema of calling applications (generally not needed in Juris-M, but useful elsewhere), CSL variables can be set in the note field of the CSL JSON input to the processor. The parsing code for doing so is now exposed, so that calling applications (including Juris-M) can make use of it where necessary for their own purposes.
Fix bugs in parsing of names from note field hack syntax
When parsing hack syntax out of the note field, single-field names were being returned as two-field names with a value in the family field only. This has been fixed.
Pre-title macros in style modules
Cites to cases decided by the European Court of Justice require the docket number before the case name. Style modules were not capable of generating this cite form, so an additional standard macro was added to the modules for that purpose.
Bibliography entries as strings
In an initially unnoticed bug, the processor bibliography function was returning the elements of a bibliography as one-item lists rather than as strings. The bug was unnoticed in many contexts because JavaScript has weak “typing”: an array converts to a string when combined with another string; and a one-element list stringifies without braces or comma delimiters. The bug was noticed in a context in Zotero that required a real string, and was duly squashed.
Locators with leading space
A Zotero user reported that entering a leading space in the locator field in the word processor caused an unwanted page label (“p.”) to magically appear in some styles. This has been fixed.
Handle styles with DOS and Mac line endings
A Zotero user reported that the latest processor version was crashing hard when styles had DOS or Mac line endings—”normal” line endings are line-feed only, DOS line endings are carriage-return+line-feed, and Mac line endings are carriage-return only. This bug did not affect the distributed Juris-M styles, but it has been fixed, so if you use a non-Unix editor (such as Windows Notepad) to modify a style for some reason, it will continue to work.
Handle styles with signle-quoted XML attribute values
In a bug arising from the same set of changes that yielded the line-endings issue, styles (and locales) that used single-quotes on XML attribute values were also crashing the processor. Single-quotes are perfectly valid XML, and this bug has been squashed.

v1.1.90

There are many changes to the infrastructure behind this release, and few changes to functionality apart from bug fixes. This back-room work will allow quicker releases, and lays a solid foundation for the development of legal style modules.

Here are the main items:

Processor code on GitHub
Most citation-related programming activity takes place on GitHub, and I finally bit the bullet and moved the citeproc-js code there, for easier deployment and smoother collaboration with developers.
JavaScript engine testing
Until recently, the processor was tested only in the Rhino JavaScript engine that runs in Java. Rhino is not used in browsers, and where the processor behaved differently under a browser engine (when sorting citations, for example), the fault was not picked up until a user noticed in the field. The test suite can now run alternative JS engines, and I will always test against the leading four engines (Rhino [Java], Spidermonkey [Firefox], V8 [Google Chrome], and JavaScript Core [Safari]) before releases.
Style and locale parsing
To do its thing, the processor must parse the XML of a style file and its associated locale strings for internal use. Although citeproc-js supported several methods of parsing XML (DOM, E4X, and a pre-parsed bespoke JSON format), setup was a non-standard ill-documented headache, with the processor “discovering” an unconnected parser object via JavaScript closure–a procedure that is as clumsy as it sounds. The parsers are now embedded in the processor itself, and it will digest any form of XML that you throw at it. Deployments should be much simpler for it.
Validated test fixtures
The test suite that backs up processor development hadn’t received much attention in recent years (apart from the addition of many test fixtures). The long-dormant facility for validating the CSL style objects used for testing has been resurrected, and all test CSL now passes validation. This brings greater assurance that what we see in the test framework will replicate in the field.
Locators in legal style modules
Modular style code is challenging for locator formatting, in particular, because these are heavily dependent on context, and the context is supplied by the calling style. With revisions to CSL-M, the extended version of CSL used in Juris-M styles, locators can be positioned using “smart conditions” that read the essential features of surrounding context. As a result the burden on legal style development has lightened considerably, and we are now ready to scale the system out to cover additional jurisdictions.
Disambiguation
The processor compares the shortest form of citations for ambiguity before adding information to citations. Legal styles that implement a “five-footnote rule” must test the near form of cites for this to work. That wasn’t happening, but it is now.
Straight-quotes hanging bug
When straight quotes were set as the preferred quotation marks in a new CSL locale, it triggered a hanging bug in the processor. This has been fixed.
Nesting mismatch errors
The processor builds citations as deeply nested string sets, with the siblings joined by a delimiter at each level to produce printed output. For performance reasons the nesting is “spoofed” by markers in a list executed from start to finish, and if the markers are incorrectly place, weird things can happen (in theory). The markers were very slightly incorrect in two instances that manifested in Zotero/Juris-M, but not in the pre-release test suite. The bugs have been fixed, and the test suite has been fixed to pick these errors up if they every occur again.
Arabic locale
The Arabic locale was not loading. At all. Ever. This has been fixed.
Charset sniffing
The regular expression used to guess whether the character set of some strings is “romanesque” included some dingbat-type characters. These have been removed.
Safe syntax for global replacements
The processor was attempting to perform global replacements with str.replace(“old”, “new”, “g”). This worked in Rhino, but broken in browser JavaScript engines. That code has been replaced with str.split(“old”).join(“new”), which works correctly everywhere.
Safer sorting
Internal sort keys included spaces, and spaces sorted differently depending on the JavaScript engine. Spaces have been replaced with “A” in sort keys, which has the effect of forcing the treatment of each element as a separate sort key.
Remove lurking list comprehensions
List comprehensions (as in [key, val] = myFun();) were removed from citeproc-js quite some time ago, because they are not valid across all JavaScript engines. Two still remained in a debugging statement. They have been removed.