Sorry to drag up an old thread, but after a long time thinking about whether there was a way to achieve cleaner footnote citations via pandoc-citeproc (which I and several others have run into trouble with; see https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/82 and https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/69 in addition to this thread), I had a idea.

I altered the CSL file of chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl, changing the class attribute of the root style element from "notes" to "in-text": <style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" version="1.0" demote-non-dropping-particle="never" page-range-format="chicago">. In my limited testing going from md to tex via pandoc, citations placed in markdown footnotes and in brackets for pandoc-citeproc are rendered with a lot more control regarding punctuation, paragraphs, multiple citations, and so on. I was able to get all the problems I was having here (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pandoc-discuss/D-fD7phDB4w) to work with this.

So that means a note like:

"This is my test sentence.[^fn1]

[^fn1]: [This is my test @citation, 98 and passim.]

[With a second graf. @citaiton2.]"

Anyway, as I said, this was just a few very basic tests, so YMMV. And of course there may be some unintended consequences that I haven't foreseen. But I thought others who have been frustrated by this might want to experiment!

On Wednesday, October 1, 2014 at 4:11:24 PM UTC-4, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

So this seems a key distinction; that the code "doesn't have access to enough of the document context."

That shouldn't be the case with pandoc (or with the XSLT I originally started with), since it's a batch process. I'd guess pandoc would be able to distinguish the two types of citations, and so it'd just be a question of how to format them differently. Though I don't have time to think about this deeply ATM, something like Jesse's heuristic may work.

On Tuesday, September 30, 2014 9:55:24 PM UTC-4, Frank Bennett wrote:
This has been a problem for the note styles forever. MLZ is starting to attract users in the legal domain, and I have had occasional reports of exactly this problem. Several users have suggested just removing terminal punctuation from the style altogether, but I've been reluctant to go the "big hammer" route in that way.

I finally moved on a solution that involves changes in MLZ and citeproc-js alone, without changes in the styles themselves. In a given document, the user is given the option of suppressing terminal punctuation on all citations. If selected, the option takes effect for all citation clusters (regardless of context), without possibility of override, but affects only note styles (class="note"). If the global option is *not* selected, terminal punctuation can be suppressed on individual citations. This seems to be satisfactory (the MLZ community is small, but there are active users in the pool and I haven't had any complaints).

The behaviour is MLZ is driven by manual user adjustments to the document and citation settings; it's not automagic because citeproc-js (running in MLZ at least) doesn't have access to enough of the document context. I suspect that it would hard to automate completely, though.

Frank Bennett

On Wednesday, October 1, 2014 9:14:14 AM UTC+9, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
On Saturday, September 27, 2014 12:20:07 AM UTC-4, John MacFarlane wrote:
+++ hgv [Sep 26 14 14:43 ]:
>A larger solution might be in giving up the ability of pandoc-citeproc to
>produce either inline citations or note citations. I understand how useful
>this is, but if it doesn't actually work for one side of it (notes), I
>don't see the value. Of course, I only work with Chicago note-bibliography,
>which is where my bias comes from. But it seems to be designed primarily
>for those who work with Chicago author-date (and other inline styles), not
>really those who use both extensively. But as I'm sure this would entail a
>fair amount of work to just get back to where it is now, I understand the
>downsides.

The question is this: in footnote styles, how SHOULD a citation that
appears inside a note be formatted? Clearly not as a footnote, but
unfortunately beyond that the style won't give us guidance. Should
it be a separate sentence? In parentheses? In brackets? These are
all stylistic variations, but the style can't help us here because
it's a note style.

If this question could be answered, perhaps progress could be made.

John (or anyone else interested in this issue) - have you checked how citeproc-js (Zotero and such) deals with this?

This has been a known issue since the foundation of CSL (I distinctly remember talking in terms of a distinction between "footnoted citations" and "citations in footnotes" a long time ago), so I have to believe it's been solved, even if I don't remember how.