Styling references

Question

I'm very new to InDesign, so please excuse me if I've missed something.  I'm trying to insert references into a document and have a table at the end like this
Branke 1998
Jurgen Branke. Creating robust solutions by means of evolutionary algorithms. In [Eiben et al. 1998], pages 119–128.
Adami 2002
Christoph Adami. What is complexity? BioEssays, 24:1085–1094, 2002.
And then I use the cross reference thing to insert the paper name as required.  The references should be styled like this
... it is important to take these ideas into account to get a robust solution. [Branke 1998]
Or, for two or more references
... it is important to take these ideas into account to get a robust solution. [Adami 2002, Branke 1998]
Styling the references to include the surrounding square brackets is obviously possible via a reference style, but that's not quite what I'm trying to do here.  What I think I want to do is define a conditional character style (or perhaps reference style) that inserts the opening bracket for the first item, the closing bracket after the last item and a comma after all items that aren't the last item.  But I don't seem to be able to do that because, as far as I can see
- GREP styles are only supported on paragraphs, not characters or references
- GREP styles can't work with styles as variables
- Only reference styles will add extra text surrounding the styled section
Is this actually possible because I've overlooked something big and obvious, or should I just give up on this one?
Thanks for any help.
PS I've just tried, and it turns out to be easy in CSS
        ul.References li { display: inline; }
            ul.References li:first-child:before { content: "[" }
            ul.References li:after { content: "," }
                ul.References li:last-child:after { content: "]" }

Answer 1

meloncholy. wrote:
I'm very new to InDesign, so please excuse me if I've missed something.  I'm trying to insert references into a document and have a table at the end like this
Branke 1998
Jurgen Branke. Creating robust solutions by means of evolutionary algorithms. In [Eiben et al. 1998], pages 119–128.
Adami 2002
Christoph Adami. What is complexity? BioEssays, 24:1085–1094, 2002.
And then I use the cross reference thing to insert the paper name as required.  The references should be styled like this
... it is important to take these ideas into account to get a robust solution. [Branke 1998]
Or, for two or more references
... it is important to take these ideas into account to get a robust solution. [Adami 2002, Branke 1998]
Since the author and year are either individual paragraphs or a single wrapped paragraph (can't tell from the example), you already have to create a cross-reference to each author manually. Although it's not a smart-parsing automation solution, I think you can do this by creating cross-reference formats like "[<reftext>]" or "[<reftext>," or "<reftext>," or "<reftext>]" and apply the appropriate ones as you build the references from their sources.
HTH
Regards,
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices
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