How can I apply a font style to in-text citations?

[Joshua Prowse]

In Word 2007, I would like all of my in-text citations (in brackets)
to be in a different style than the rest of the text. Perhaps a
different font. Maybe the same font, but just in italics.

Is there any way to do this? Perhaps by editing the file that defines
the citations?

Thank you.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

The Word 2007 Citation Manager can only be customized if you know XML
and at present there seems to be no documentation on how to use XML to
customize it, so that's not very feasible.

Are the in-text citations fields? If you hit alt-F9, do they change to
show Field Codes? If so, it may be possible to do a Find and Replace to
format a certain type of field.

It may also be possible to do a wildcard Find and Replace to format text
within brackets.

By the way--why do you want this? It's not standard--is someone
demanding it? I would not advise it for formal document presentation.

 

[Joshua Prowse]

Thanks for the suggestions. Your'e right that it's not standard and
nobody is demanding it. I just thought that it would enhance
readability if the citations were in a different colour. Basically,
I've always used footnotes for my citations until switching to Word
2007 which seems to only do in-text citation, so I'm now using in-text
citation, but I don't like to way it breaks up my text. I guess it's
basically just that I'm not use to citing this way so that's why I'm
thinking about doing something somewhat unusual.

I thought about find-and-replace, but I'll only bother to do this if
there's a way to automate it. Alt+F9 is really cool - I didn't know
that function existed.

 

[Joshua Prowse]

I took a look at the XML file and it's quite scary, so I'm not going
to touch it. I feel quite comfortable with XML, but it's just so long
and I have no idea where to begin and my task is only of minor
importance, so I guess I'll just give up on it. : )

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hmm.... I would say it won't enhance readability, but rather will draw
more attention to text that you actually want to fade into the
background. I would advise against it (but I always find in-text
citations horribly intrusive compared to footnote numbers anyhow). I
could see this being useful if it were a temporary measure so that you
could quickly skim for a sense of which texts you were leaning on most
heavily, but as a professor, I would not want to read such a document.