biblatexciting
I have started using LaTeX with biblatex to format my dissertation. I need my citation to look something like: (johnson, 2010:29), which is (author, year:page).
Then there are some citations that I have to make look like (Xenophon, Hellenica 7.6.2), which is (author, italicized book, section).
Is it possible to modify \autocite to work like this? If so… where do I start? Which file do I have to modify?
biblatex-chicago unfortunately doesn't have a dashed option like the standard styles. To avoid printing the dash, you can clear \bbx@lasthash before printing each entry using the \AtEveryBibitem hook. \bbx@lasthash normally expands to the name hash of the last entry. It is used by the drivers for dash checks.
The alphabetic year suffix used for disambiguation corresponds to the extrayear field. It can be cleared with \AtEveryBibitem as well.
Just add the following to your preamble:
\makeatletter
\AtEveryBibitem{%
\global\undef\bbx@lasthash%
\clearfield{extrayear}}
\makeatother
Using a modified tufte-common.def file you can create tufte-latex documents with biblatex. A limitation is that tufte-latex modifies footnotes. So biblatex features such as \smartcite inside footnotes and footnote detection with \iffootnote may not work as intended. Most of this has already been covered in another post.
As for the citation style, you can get most of the way there with some edits to the textcite bibliography macro and \smartcite. Both of these are defined in numeric.cbx.
\documentclass[nobib]{tufte-handout}
\usepackage{hyphenat}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=numeric,citetracker=true,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\makeatletter
% If not seen, avoid compact lists and print full citation
\renewbibmacro*{textcite}{%
\ifciteseen
{}
{\clearfield{namehash}}%
\iffieldequals{namehash}{\cbx@lasthash}
{\multicitedelim}
{\cbx@tempa
\ifciteseen
{\ifnameundef{labelname}
{\printfield[citetitle]{labeltitle}}
{\printnames{labelname}}}
{\usedriver
{\DeclareNameAlias{sortname}{default}%
\clearfield{pages}%
\clearfield{pagetotal}}
{\thefield{entrytype}}}%
\addspace\bibopenbracket}%
\ifnumequal{\value{citecount}}{1}
{\usebibmacro{prenote}}
{}%
\usebibmacro{cite}%
\savefield{namehash}{\cbx@lasthash}%
\gdef\cbx@tempa{\bibclosebracket\multicitedelim}}
% Make \smartcite like \textcite
\DeclareCiteCommand{\smartcite}[\iffootnote\mkbibbrackets\mkbibfootnote]
{\let\cbx@tempa=\empty
\undef\cbx@lasthash}
{\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
\usebibmacro{textcite}}
{}
{\usebibmacro{postnote}%
\bibclosebracket}
\makeatother
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
One of the most prominent and distinctive features of this style is the
extensive use of sidenotes \autocites(See)()[10--15]{knuth:ct:a}[10]{companion}.
There is a wide margin to provide ample room for sidenotes and small figures
\autocite{knuth:ct:a,knuth:ct:b}. Any footnotes will automatically be converted to
sidenotes.\footnote{Results from \textcite{knuth:ct:a,knuth:ct:b,companion} showed
that...}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
Some notes:
autocite=footnote option setting makes \autocite use \smartcite as its backend citation command.\ifciteseen test needs citation tracking enabled. In the example global tracking is enabled via citetracker=true. Alternative settings are possible. Refer to the manual for details.\usedriver. The first argument to this command allows you to hook code in before printing. This is a good place to suppress fields with \clearfield and friends. In the example, I suppress the pages and pagetotal fields to avoid confusion with page references in postnotes.numeric, \textcite generates compact citation lists. This complicates printing full citations. The edits to textcite take an easy way out by simply replacing the labelname or labeltitle with the full citation.numeric style isn't particularly suited to this customization. Refer to the verbose style or any of its variants for some better alternatives.
Best Answer
Your author-year citation command can be obtained using the
authoryearstyle and some minor edits tonameyeardelimand thepostnoteformat. A variant of this using the title in place of the year can easily be defined using the\AtNextCitehook.An advantage of this approach is that it works for any of the author-year styles. Here's the citation output of the same document using the package options
style=authoryear-icompandautocite=footnote.To further customize the citation label for a specific entry, you can make use of the
shorthandandlabelfields in your bib file. In the sample document, the entry by Kant goes by the shorthand "KpV". This overrides bothlabelnameandlabelyear+extrayear. The Chicago Manual of Style has the label "CMS". It overrides onlylabelname.All of the citation style changes can be incorporated into
\autocite, but you'll have to provide some details on which entries need to be cited with titles. These can be distinguished through criteria specified on existing bibliographic data or through a category defined in your document preamble or bib file.