Spacing Problems with Citations

[Jason]

I am attempting to create a citation style that allows the reference manager
in Microsoft Office Word 2007 to use footnote citations, and have run into
two problems. The first problem seems to either be hard coded into Word or
an option somewhere that I cannot find; Word inserts a space preceding the
citation text when the citation field appears after most non-space, non-tab
characters (no space appears after a normal space (U+0020) or a tab (U+0009),
but it appears after, for example, em-space (U+2003), and zero-width space
(U+200B)). Normally this is not a problem, but my teacher told me that there
should not be a space between a period and the footnote number. Is there an
option somewhere that I can set in Word to fix this? Is there a way to get
Word's citation field to treat a zero-width space as a "space" character (I
noticed that the spelling and grammar checker treats it like a space, but the
citation field does not)? If not, is there some negative-width Unicode
character supported by Word that I can have precede the citation number in
the style sheet, so that the space is written over?

My other problem concerns superscript citation separators. I figured out a
way to get the style sheet (.xsl) to mimic superscript numbers by writing a
template that replaces numbers with their corresponding Unicode superscript
character. However, I would like to separate citations by a superscript
comma, and I have found no Unicode character to do this. I have tried
multiple ways of getting the citation to appear superscript, such as the
 tag, using the style attribute of the <p></p> tag to mimic
superscript, among others, but found that Word seems to ignore any HTML/CSS
that should change the size, font-face, color, position, etc. of a citation.
Why does this happen, and how can I get the commas in my citations to display
superscript without having to manually superscript them after every
bibliographic update?
Thank you.

 

[Jason]

I figured out how to fix the first problem, but not the second one. By
placing the citation field inside of a quote field (and not encasing the
citation field in "..."), the citation field does not display the space
(since there is a space between the word quote and the citation field), but
the space does not display due to the nature of the quote field. However, I
am still looking for an answer to the second problem, and I would also
appreciate a way to solve the first problem that does not involve nesting
fields.

 

[p0]

I figured out how to fix the first problem, but not the second one.  By
placing the citation field inside of a quote field (and not encasing the
citation field in "..."), the citation field does not display the space
(since there is a space between the word quote and the citation field), but
the space does not display due to the nature of the quote field.  However, I
am still looking for an answer to the second problem, and I would also
appreciate a way to solve the first problem that does not involve nesting
fields.

Regarding your second problem: in-text citations inherit the style of
the "parent" they belong to rather than using the style returned by
the stylesheet. By default this is the paragraph style of the
paragraph they belong to. I guess there are arguments both in favor
and against that decision. In Word you can create character styles and
imply them to an in-text citation. Then when you execute the
stylesheet again to 'reformat' all in-text citations and
bibliographies, the character style you applied to the in-text
citation remains (it is the in-text citation "parent" style, so it
inherits that one). So the first time when you enter the in-text
citation, you have to manually set its style to your prefered
character style, and as of then, it will always be formatted
correctly.

To create your own character style for citations, open up the style
pane (alt+ctrl+shift+s). Then at the bottom click the "New style"
button. In the window you get, set the following:

Name: Citation (or whatever you prefer)
Style type: Character
Style based on: Default Paragraph Font

Click the "Format ..." button and select "Font ...". Select
"Superscript" and press "Ok".

Then whenever you have added an in-text citation, just select it, and
set its style to the 'Citation' style you created.

Not a complete solution, but certainly a manageable workaround.

Yves