TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 1999-07 > 0930865371-01


From: Terry Reigel <<A HREF="mailto:"></A>>
Subject: Re: TMG-L: Custom Source Elements & Nested Cites
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 17:42:51 -0400


Lee Hoffman wrote:

>Take a look at the TMG Tips and Helps page of my website. There is a
>write-up on Source Groups and Source Elements. Also Appendix I or the
v4.0
>Reference Manual also explains it fairly well.

Thanks to Lee, and others, for pointing me to Appendix I -- I had read the
main sections in the manual and help, but missed the Appendix. The Appendix
didn't really help though (other than to identify which elements are in
which groups), but Lee's web page finally did it for me. There are not
really 102 source elements (plus those you create), but only 30 (the source
groups). All the others are just various alises for the 30 "source groups"
which are really source elements.

So I can, in theory, use up to 30 elements in a given source template. But
if I try to make several complex templates I have to be very careful not to
use two names for the same element (actually, TMG will keep me from doing
it). And if I make custom elements with the same name in different data
sets, I have to keep them in the same group in both sets, or I have a
problem if I try to merge the sets. Right so far?

This suggests a problem in creating more than a very few complex templates,
because you need to create a number of custom elements in order for the
labels on the source descriptions to be understandable. So confusion over
groups and between datasets is very possible unless one documents
carefully.

So now I'm back to my basic question. I got into this trying to deal with
sources that themselves contain useful cites for the data I am recording. I
was trying to build templates that reflect both my source (A) and the cited
source (B), building both up from source elements. That now seems too
awkward to work well.

On alternative seems to be to do the same thing, but capture the cited
source (B) entirely in a single source element, rather than building it up
from several elements. Actually, I might use two, one for the long form and
the other for the short form. But I could then use the CD only once (unless
there is a way to split the CD), so I couldn't very neatly capture, say
page detail, for both my source (A) and the cited source (B).

Another alternative is to simply capture the entire reference to the cited
source (B) in the CD. But then I have to enter it on each citation, on
every tag that refers to it, which seems painful.

Anybody found a better way to handle this?

Terry Reigel
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