Editing Styles

To edit styles, you can use the Visual CSL Editor, developed in a cooperation between Mendeley and Columbia University Library. Basic instructions are here.

Alternatively, styles can be edited manually in any (plain) text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X). Note that text editors with XML support can be of great benefit by offering features like syntax highlighting and real-time validation. Popular choices are the oXygen XML Editor, Emacs in nXML mode, and jEdit.

Currently most documentation for editing CSL styles can be found at:

• http://citationstyles.org/citation-style-language/documentation/

Start from the Right Style

Before you begin editing a style, make sure you start with the most recent version available in the style repository. This is especially important for Zotero users. If you ever used a version of Zotero prior to 2.1, the "styles" directory in your Zotero data directory will likely still contain styles in the older CSL 0.8.1 format (Zotero internally upgrades these to CSL 1.0). If you already have a customized CSL 0.8.1 style that you would like to edit further, consider upgrading it to CSL 1.0 to take advantage of the newest CSL features.

CSL 0.8.1 and 1.0 styles can be easily distinguished by looking at the <style/> element at the top of the style. CSL 1.0 styles include a version attribute on this element with a value of "1.0", e.g. <style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" version="1.0">. CSL 0.8.1 styles lack this attribute.