Style Authoring

Use this skill to draft, extend, or validate Citum YAML styles with schema-grounded guidance and CLI validation.

Purpose

Help produce Citum YAML styles that are valid against the schema and pass CLI rendering checks. Never present a draft as final unless both schema and CLI validation pass, or the user explicitly accepts an unverified draft.

Citum Structural Model

Citum's reuse system is different from CSL. Understanding this upfront prevents the most common hallucination — inventing macro:, template-ref: blocks, or name-list macros that don't exist.

Citum has two levels of inheritance, not one:

Level 1 — Style-level extends

At the top of a style file, extends: <name> inherits an entire compiled-in base style. The child then overrides only what differs: