Citation Elements

Citation strings are composed of one or more elements. Nested citations, being less complex (and less informative) than non-nested citations, are composed of only a single element, the citation delimiter. This string is user defined in the variable sc-citation-delimiter and has a default value of ">". Nested citations will contain a single space between the last level (oldest) citation and the original text. It is usually a good idea to make sc-citation-delimiter a single character.

Non-nested citations are composed of four elements, three of which are directly user definable. The elements are concatenated together, in this order:

1. the citation leader. The citation leader is contained in the variable sc-citation-leader, and has the default value of a string containing a single tab character.
2. the attribution string. This element is supplied automatically by supercite, based on your preferences and the original message's mail headers, though you may be asked to confirm supercite's choice. See section Attributions for more details.
3. the citation delimiter as described above.
4. the citation separator. The citation separator is contained in the variable sc-citation-separator, and has the default value of a string containing a single space character.

For example, suppose, you were using the default values for the above variables, and supercite provided the attribution string `Jane'. In this case, the composed, non-nested citation string used might be something like `\tJane> ' (the `\t' represents a tab character). This citation string will be inserted in front of every line in the original message that is not already cited. Supercite uses the regular expression in the variable sc-cite-regexp to determine whether a line is already cited or not. The default value for this variable is:

"\\s *[-a-zA-Z0-9_.]*>+\\s *"

Nemacs users may want to set sc-cite-regexp to:

"\\s *\\([a-zA-Z0-9]\\|\\cc\\|\\cC\\|\\ch\\|\\cH\\|\\ck\\|\\cK\\)*\\s *>+"