referred to in _articles_ 28.2 and 28.4 results in “referred to the Articles …” and referred to in _-articles_ 28.2 and 28.4 results in “referred to in Articles …”. However, to avoid having to change the code of all clauses, is there a central styling setting to remove “the” before “Article” in English?
Unfortunately, the use of an article is a default setting that cannot be changed through central styling. You will indeed have to use the minus-symbol…
And is it perhaps a possibility to make it a new styling setting (delete the word “the” if it precedes _article_?). One of my colleagues noted that, in English, the article “the” should never be used as in “the Article 26” for instance. However, this is perfectly possible in Dutch, so if you translate clauses to English, then this would that the clause author should not forget to manually add the minus-symbol.
We did a bit more research, and you / your colleague is indeed right: the article should be dropped by default in English.
We will change this for the next release.
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Good remark by Bernd.
I might be overlooking it, but it seems that there is no documentation on the use of _article_ and its forms. Grammar sheet is the only place I can find information on this. Would be good to have brief note on this.
You are correct about the lack of documentation. See the new help-page about this subject:
https://help.clausebase.com/kb/abstract-article-references/
While drafting, I actually realised that it is probably not such a good idea to change the software, as this would create a deviation for English, as opposed to all the other languages. Even though Bernd is right that in the majority of cases you will not use “the article” in English, there are situations where you will want to use this expression, and it would be awkward if the different languages of the platform differ on the basis of what happens to be less or more used in a particular language.
(@Bernd: to quickly identify the clauses that currently make use of article, I would recommend to perform a bare search for _article_ or _-article_)
All in all, as explained in the new help page, the use cases for this article stuff are actually very limited. There should not be many situations where you actually want to use this.
The help documentation was very useful, thanks. Also, I agree that it would make sense to keep the software consistent.