Editing Styles

At this point there are no dedicated tools to create or modify CSL styles. However, styles can be edited manually in any (plain) text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows and 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 (the latter does not offer RELAX NG XML validation).

The following sources are good starting points to learn how to edit CSL styles:

• http://citationstyles.org/downloads/primer.html
• http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles

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.