As mentioned earlier, Supercite uses various frames to perform
certain jobs such as mail header information extraction and mail header
nuking. However, these frames are not available for you to customize,
except through abstract interfaces such as sc-nuke-mail-header,
et al.
However, the citation frames Supercite uses provide a lot of customizing
power and are thus available to you to change to suit your needs. The
workhorse of citation is the frame contained in the variable
sc-default-cite-frame. This frame recognizes many situations,
such as blank lines, which it interprets as paragraph separators. It
also recognizes previously cited nested and non-nested citations in the
original message. By default it will coerce non-nested citations into
your preferred citation style, and it will add a level of citation to
nested citations. It will also simply cite uncited lines in your
preferred style.
In a similar vein, there are default frames for unciting and
reciting, contained in the variables
sc-default-uncite-frame and sc-default-recite-frame
respectively.
As mentioned earlier (see Recognizing Citations), citations are
recognized through the values of the regular expressions
sc-citation-root-regexp, et al. To recognize odd styles, you
could modify these variables, or you could modify the default citing
frame. Alternatively, you could set up association lists of frames for
recognizing specific alternative forms.
For each of the actions—citing, unciting, and reciting—an alist is
consulted to find the frame to use (sc-cite-frame-alist,
sc-uncite-frame-alist, and sc-recite-frame-alist
respectively). These frames can contain alists of the form:
((infokey (regexp . frame) (regexp . frame) …) (infokey (regexp . frame) (regexp . frame) …) (…))
Where infokey is a key suitable for sc-mail-field,
regexp is a regular expression which is string-match’d
against the value of the sc-mail-field key, and frame is
the frame to use if a match occurred. frame can be a variable
containing a frame or a frame in-lined.
When Supercite is about to cite, uncite, or recite a region, it consults the appropriate alist and attempts to find a frame to use. If one is not found from the alist, then the appropriate default frame is used.