Creating a CITE-Compliant Style

What is CITE?

CITE is a document-structure convention for debate evidence. CITE has two advantages: it makes it easier to format debate briefs in a word processor, and debaters can copy evidence from one CITE brief to another and have it instantly reformatted to match their preferred style. (For more information on CITE, see ElegantEvidence.org.)

Most built-in export styles in Factsmith are CITE-compliant. Factsmith does not export 100% CITE-compliant templates, complete with keyboard shortcuts and dynamic tables of contents, but evidence exported with a CITE-compliant style can be pasted into other CITE templates with no problem.

Creating a CITE-compliant style

Making a new CITE-compliant style from scratch is complicated, but the basic structure of all CITE-compliant styles is the same, so it's easy to make a new one by copying an existing one and modifying the paragraph style settings:

1. Copy an existing style. Using Windows Explorer, browse to the Styles subfolder of your Factsmith installation (usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Factsmith on newer computers). Copy an existing CITE-compliant style (like Snapdragon I) and rename the copy to the name of your new style.
2. Restart Factsmith so the new style will show up in the Options dialog.
3. Open the style for editing. Click Tools > Options on the menu, click the Style tab, select your new style, and click Edit Style.
4. Update the information in the About tab.
5. Edit the paragraph and character styles to your liking. Click on the Style tab, and use the dropdowns at the right to switch between the different paragraph/character styles and edit their formatting codes. (For a list of valid formatting codes, see Formatting Codes; if you want know what each paragraph and character style does, you can look through the CITE Standards or look at an exported brief.)
6. Click OK to save your changes.
7. Test and tweak your style as needed.

You can change page and margin settings on the Document tab of the Style Editor, or change how the table of contents is numbered on the Special tab. For more elaborate modifications – like changing the headers and footers or changing the order of information in citations – you will need to modify the parse strings; read the rest of the style documentation to see how they work and what can go in them.

Tips and Tricks

To keep cards from crossing pages: Make sure the paragraph styles Tagline, Subtag, Citation, and Quote - Keep With Next all have the <lock> formatting code, and the paragraph styles Quote and Quote - Read All have the <keep> formatting code (not the <lock> formatting code). This will tell the word processor to keep those parts of a card together, but allow it to break after the last paragraph of a quote.

To style the table of contents: Most CITE-compliant styles use the paragraph styles TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 3, and TOC 4 for different levels of the Table of Contents, although some (such as Snapdragon I) do not style the Table of Contents, and some (such as Blue Book) do not have a Table of Contents at all. If the style you copied does not use TOC 1, TOC 2, etc., you can create them (on the Styles tab) and set the Table of Contents to use them (on the Special tab).

To shrink text that is not underlined: Set Quote and Quote - Keep With Next to smaller sized text (with a formatting code like <size8>, for 8-pt text), and set the character style Quote - Read This to larger text (with a formatting code like <size12>, for 12-pt text). The paragraph style Quote - Read All should also have normal sized text (e.g. <size12>).

Help! I'm not seeing underlining in the exported brief anymore! Make sure the character style Quote - Read This has the <u> formatting code (or whatever formatting you prefer for emphasis). If the export style is set to use special formatting for underlining, as CITE-compliant styles are, Factsmith won't assume you want to export emphasis as underlining unless you specifically say so.