Dan:

Well, the real fix would be to get rid of the visible markup—which works because the citation processor supports it, not Zotero itself—and just use a stripped down rich-text interface for titles. People shouldn't have to enter HTML themselves.

That's not the only, or even necessarily the best, solution. You could also allow a simple text-based markup, and then do as reimerth suggests. This is how Google+ works, for example, and has the great advantage that it doesn't add yet more clutter to an already cramped UI.

Bruce: There wouldn't be any added clutter. It would use keyboard shortcuts, as Rintze says, which are more discoverable and user-friendly than markup.

If there are things other than bold and italics that would need to be in there, markup might make more sense, but I don't see any advantage to markup otherwise.

There is more variation in shortcuts for superscript/subscript, but I don't see why we couldn't adopt the shortcuts from another program. E.g.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/make-text-superscript-or-subscript-HP005189455.aspx

Superscript: Press CTRL+SHIFT+=
Subscript: Press CTRL+=

http://www.apple.com/support/pages/shortcuts/

Make text superscript Control-Command-plus sign (+)
Make text subscript Control-Command-minus sign (-)

That leaves just "small caps".

MS word shortcuts are locale-specific. Very annoying since I have English version on one computer and Swedish on another.

Yes please settle on one set of shortcuts

I find markup easier to remember than funky keyboard shortcuts.

I don't think you're the standard case here. And Ctrl/Cmd-I is hardly funky—it's pretty much universal in rich-text editors.

And as I noted above, we can also put these in a context menu when text is selected.

I'm not talking about those, but the other cases

OK. I agree with you there, which is why I suggested context menu options for super/sub. There's no particular harm in choosing some shortcuts for super/sub for power users, but I doubt they'd get much use.

Overall, though, I think Ctrl/Cmd-B and Ctrl/Cmd-I plus context menu options are an easy win over markup for general ease of use and discoverability.

smalls caps that aren't actually even real small caps

If this is a reference to the non-standard markup citeproc-js uses for small caps, I agree that it should recognize <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">. That should be possible, as an alternative to the current shorthand markup. I'll take a look, if that's desired.

fbennett: I think Bruce was referring to the fact that small caps are often simulated, since most fonts don't have, as typography geeks would prefer, a separate set of small caps glyphs.

Just today discovered that formatting titles now works, great, and thanks devs! No more hand editing of the refs in Word. The present implementation comes with a drawback, though: Searching for titles (which I use quite often) requires that you format your search string, too. For example, the title stored as:

Nanosecond electron tunneling between the hemes in cytochrome <i>bo</i>₃

is not found if searching simply for, say, cytochrome bo3.

Any plans of introducing an option to ignore formatting in the search function? Or maybe it's there already, and I just haven't found it...