Customizing citations for local court rules and styles other than those supported by LegalCitation

Citation provides you with a powerful and easy to use custom format editor that will help you create your own custom format files. Custom format files are simply editable "publishing style definitions" you can use to generate references (or output) from your Citation datafiles. Citation custom format files are text files that contain instructions, telling Citation how to write your citations: which fields to include, what punctuation to include, how to format names, and so on. Custom format files can be as complex or as simple as you like. You could write a very simple format file that would print only the contents of the Book title field, with a hard return after each title: <BK> <HRt> Format files to actually generate citations can be written easily. A very elementary custom format file, for formatting a citation of a journal article, might look like this: <AU>. (<YR>). <AT>. <JR>, <VO>: <PG>. This format file would generate references for journal articles, with the fields and punctuation in the order defined by the format file: Brent, Peter. (1994). Misreading. Culture, 8: 232-241. A case could be formatted for a court requiring citations in a style quite different from ALWD or Bluebook (which are prepackaged with LegalCitation) with the following set of instructions: <AT>:. [<PR>, <YR>]. <VO>. <JR>, <PG>. This format would render a citation with the fields: Case Name (AT), Jurisdiction (PR), Year of decision (YR), Volume (VO), Reporter (JR), and 1st Page (PG) - arranged as they are, with the punctuation, in the custom format file: Wisener v. Went. [AUB Ct, 1944]. 24 Aud Terr Dec 1035. In very basic terms, Citation reads the text in a custom format file as a kind of "map" for printing fields and punctuation. Only the fields included in the custom format file are included in the output. Any punctuation typed in to the custom format file will be included in output as well. Complete documentation for the custom format editor is available in PDF format.