I’m working on a family history book and have a question for those that write non-fiction/academic works (while I’m probably not going to formally publish my book, I want to try to follow accepted standards so the book can be useful in the future for family research). About 100 years ago a distant cousin published a book on one branch of my family, and I will be quoting that book on occasion in my book. Some of the quotes I will be using contain quotes of other material. How do I set up styles to deal with that?
As an example - I’ll quote from Block quotation - Wikipedia (internal links and footnotes omitted):
In typesetting, block quotations can be distinguished from the surrounding text by variation in typeface (often italic vs. roman), type size, or by indentation. Often combinations of these methods are used, but are not necessary. Block quotations are also visually distinguished from preceding and following main text blocks by a white line or half-line space. For example:
Fielding hides his own opinions on the matter deep in Tom Jones:
Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are. From this complaisance the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and have so far succeeded that they are now become the masters, and have the assurance to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them.
The example has three levels of quoting (which I don’t think I’m going to need). Markdown deals with it nicely, but I’m (intentionally) not working directly in markdown, I’m starting with the “General Non-Fiction (LaTeX)” and working in LaTeX so I can use the genealogytree package.
Should I just clone the current Block Quote style to “Inner Block Quote” (to as many levels as needed)? I assume that LaTeX handles nested Edited to add that it does nothing special with nested \begin{quote} ... \end{quote}
sections correctly (I have not tested it yet, but I will shortly).\begin{quote} ... \end{quote}
sections. Time to play with Pandoc and see how it converts nested markdown block quotes to LaTeX.
Bonus questions (if you’ve gotten this far):
If the original text being quoted contains footnotes and/or citations in the original text, how are they normally handled?
If the original text doesn’t “properly” cite it’s quote, but I am able to find a citation for it, how is that normally handled?
Is there a “Academic Writing for Dummies Non-Academic’s” that I should be reading so I don’t have to ask some of these questions here?
Thanks for any assistance.