Re: bibliography with certain canonical reference

Hi Julian,

I completely understand your reluctance to disturb a bibliographic setup 
that is already working well, especially when only a small number of 
references require a more specialized treatment.

I use specifications such as APA or Chicago myself, and I think they are 
very good tools for ordinary bibliographic work. But I would still 
encourage you, when you have the opportunity, to experiment with 
|context-sbl|.

SBL becomes particularly useful when bibliography and citation move into 
more heavily scholarly territory: several editions of the same work, 
multivolume editions, collected works, ancient or patristic texts, 
canonical or conventional locators, and so on. In such cases, references 
often need to remain independent of the pagination of a particular 
modern edition.

This is precisely the sort of situation we encounter with Plato, 
Aristotle, Augustine, the Church Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, and many 
others, where established systems such as Stephanus or Bekker numbering 
— or other canonical forms of reference — are often more useful than 
ordinary page locators.

So when a text really does contain a “myriad” of references, as is often 
the case in substantial academic or editorial work, and particularly 
when non-Latin scripts and several editions or languages have to 
coexist, SBL is worth considering.

Joe McCollum has done a remarkable job in making the SBL specification 
work in ConTeXt. There are still a few corners that could be improved, 
but it already handles a surprisingly wide range of scholarly citation 
problems very well.

And thank you very much for your kind words about the Garden pages. I’m 
especially pleased that you find the bibliography and TEI material 
useful. The bibliography material has now indeed grown into a 
substantial ANSS-CE draft, so feedback from real use cases such as yours 
is particularly valuable.

Best,
JP


Le 17/08/2026 à 00:31, jbf a écrit :
>
> Yes, JP, as expected,
>
> \cite
> [alternative=authoryear,
> righttext={X.33.50}]
> [main::augustine1991confessions]
> does exactly as you said and as I hoped. Amongst the myriad of 
> citations in the text I am dealing with there is just a small handful 
> relating to the /Confessions/, so I was eager not to do anything too 
> dramatic with the bibliography scheme that otherwise is working well 
> for this text. I had searched around and tried the older (mkii I 
> think) approach using extras=, but that was not getting me anywhere. 
> 'righttext' is what I needed!
>
> So thanks once again for this very useful solution. Your work in the 
> 'Garden' in this referencing area (and, I might also add on TEI 
> critical editing) is very valuable and deserves a wide readership. 
> Glad to know it will find its way into  ANSS-CE.
> Julian

___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : [email protected] / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl
webpage  : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror)
archive  : https://github.com/contextgarden/context
wiki     : https://wiki.contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________