The same is true for all biological sciences where taxonomic species names must be italicized in titles of bibliographic references.

In addition, subscript, superscript, and greek characters occur frequently within the title of references.

I agree--I have a lot of titles with italics in them. It would be nice to apply the same rich-text or wiki-style markup that is being planned for use in notes to titles as well.

There might be a danger of building too comprehensive a solution on this one. Just handling italics (since super/subscripting is already there with Unicode) would go a long way toward taking a good chunk of EndNote business. Maybe a phased approach would work here.

Matthias -- yes, I'm thinking primarily that a user ought to be able to say this piece of a text is a title, or a species name, rather than that just just allow any rich text anywhere.

But that gets to questions of input/output. How does a user encode that information, and how is it preserved on export and so forth?

On the latter, I see two options: some wiki-markup-like subset where the title or species name is still just string (a simple RDF property), or just encode it in XHTML as an XML literal in the property, where you just have spans with classes like "title" and "species-name" and so forth. My hunch is the second is better and more flexible.

mccaskey: right, this is why it's better to use semantic coding (what the span of text means) rather than presentational (what it looks like).

Oops. That didn't look right. I forgot to HTML-encode my angle brackets. Apologies.

That should have said:

In the short-term, I am putting <I> and </I> in my titles and have added the following lines to the ZoteroInsertFormattedText function in zotero.dot (right after tagIndex = -1).

While InStr(text, "<I>")
backslashIndex = InStr(text, "<I>")
text = Left$(text, backslashIndex - 1) & "\i " & Mid$(text, backslashIndex + 3)
Wend
While InStr(text, "</I>")
backslashIndex = InStr(text, "</I>")
text = Left$(text, backslashIndex - 1) & "\i0 " & Mid$(text, backslashIndex + 4)
Wend

Bruce: Special entities are escaped automatically in XML export. (We couldn't have export produce broken output any time anyone had an ampersand in a title...)

For semantic markup, I think using span/class makes the most sense. Ideally, I'd like to solve this problem in a way that kept users from needing to enter the markup by hand (and instead, say, highlighting a block of text and using context menu options prepopulated with various semantic descriptors), but that would be considerably more involved to implement and, frankly, I've never seen WYSIWYG markup editing that actually really worked after the first edit. (At the very least, if we did do that, we would still need a manual mode.) It might be nice to have that as a goal, especially for notes, but to start, at least, this will probably just be by hand.

Some questions:

1) Is there a fixed set of semantic descriptors ('title', 'species-name', etc.), and/or is there a generic fallback style for unknown classes?

2) Do we still support <i> and other presentational HTML tags in metadata fields?

2.5) At least for notes, we probably do need to support WYSIWYG HTML. How is semantic markup handled in notes, and what special behaviors (linking to other items, etc.), if any, does it have? Bruce began to talk about this a little on another thread. This is a non-trivial problem and ultimately is probably related to the sorts of URI issues that Bruce brought up on the dev list.

3) To what extent are the CSL style rules followed within Zotero itself? I don't think the items list even supports rich text (at least, granularly--I think you can just style a whole cell), so that's probably out. The metadata table could be made to work, but it might make sense to just default to italics for any <span>, since we probably don't want to run every field through the CSL engine, and, of course, the formatting would be style-specific.

Semantic metadata fields and HTML in notes should be able to happen pretty soon once we resolve these issues. Truly semantic/relational markup in notes is a more difficult problem and is probably a bit further down the line.

1) For titles, add:
Foreign words. This is very common in some disciplines, such as mine, history.
Ship names. I'd never have thought of it, but if Chicago says it, it must be so.

I don't understand much of this thread so I just wonder if there's a simple method to get italics in titles yet? That is crucial for me if I am to use zotero as pretty much everything I cite has a species namne in it.


Johan

As there seems to be some activity in Trac (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/439), I would like to point out some of the peculiarities of people working in the life sciences. We frequently use super- and subscript text as well as smallcaps in titles, so it would be very helpful if Zotero would allow users to also format titles in this way.

Some examples:

Smallcaps
http://www.springerlink.com/content/c9654h9700x4nn47/

Non-numeric subscript
http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/v2/n1/abs/nsb0195-69.html

Non-numeric superscript
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020163

Any progress on this? I too have a lot of scientific names in the titles of my citations and it's going to mean a lot of manual work for me to fix them in my bibliography later on. I don't know if a rich-text editor is necessary in the short-term. I'd just like some kind of tag I could insert into the titles that would be recognized and converted into italics in the bibliography, such as <i></i>. Thanks.

Just to up...
Is that function available?
I need italics in many title...

Here's what I've managed to come up with, after hours of struggling (I figure it'd be a waste not to share).
This is for OpenOffice Writer, but if you know about Wildcards (Microsoft Word) you can probably adapt it accordingly. Don't know enough about the equivalent for WordPerfect.

I use the character "/" in the Zotero item to delimit parts of titles that need to be italicized. This may or may not work for you, depending on whether or not you will use the / character elsewhere just as part of your document. The trick here: find a keyboard character you NEVER WOULD HAVE USED OTHERWISE, like maybe "~".

In OpenOffice Writer:

1) Create a mock text, e.g.,

/This is a test and/ this text is outside of the slashes.

2) Tools-->Macros-->Record Macro (if "Record Macro isn't there, check out this page: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=28782&p=131108&hilit=record#p131108)

3) Ctrl + F to open Find and Replace

4) Click on the "More" button, and check the box next to "Regular expressions"

5) In the "Search for" box, enter "/(.*)/" (without the quotes)

6) Put your cursor in the "Replace with" box, then click "Format." On the "Font" tab, under "Typeface," select "Italic". Click "OK."

7) Click inside the "Replace with" box again, and enter "$1" (without the quotes)

8) Click "Replace All". A confirmation window opens, saying "Search key replaced # times," where # is the number of times the change was made. Click "Ok" to close this window.

9) Uncheck the "Regular expressions" box, then click "Close."

10) Click "Stop Recording" on the Recording Macro window.

11) Give your macro a name you'll remember and click "Save." (I have it under "My Macros." I don't know if it'd be better to put it under "OpenOffice.org Macros" or not; I leave that question to someone more technically advanced than I.)

12) Now, to assign the keyboard shortcut: Go to Tools-->Customize. Select the "Keyboard" tab. In the "Shortcut Keys" window, choose the keyboard shortcut you'd like to use (I use Alt+I), In the bottom half of the window ("Functions"), under "Category," scroll all the way down, and expand "OpenOffice.org Macros." Expand "user," then "Standard," and your macro should be there. Highlight it, and click "Ok>'

13) You should now be good to go. Enter some more mock text, e.g. "/This is another test/ and this text is outside the slashes, hit your keyboard shortcut, and see if it changes the text to italics. If it does, it will also work without a problem with any footnotes or endnotes you've created with Zotero that use the /.../ to delimit the portion of the title that needs to be italicized.

Of course, every time you "refresh" your citations, it'll change the italics back to /.../, and you'll need to hit your keyboard shortcut again. But this'll do the trick.

Hope this helps someone!

You should use the markup used in the post http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3875/rich-text-in-titles/?Focus=26555#Comment_26555 instead because then you will be more safe in the future

As I understand the new CSL-version will. For now, you should use these htlm-tags and use the macro that can be found here

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3875/rich-text-in-titles/?Focus=26555#Comment_26555

@mheim,

(1) Take a deep breath;
(2) Open a clean Firefox profile for testing;
(3) In the new profile, install the development trunk extension and plugin;
(4) Add tags to a title field as described here;
(5) Create a document and insert a reference to the newly decorated item into it;
(6) ???
(7) Profit!

(Edit: I hasten to add that I do not speak for the core developers of Zotero, and nothing in the glib response above should be taken to reflect the views of the Zotero project or of its staff!)

@Avram and Frank
Thanks for both your answers.
I will give the development trunk a try (albeit I won't let it anywhere near my working data).
Also, thanks for the (albeit understandably evasive) date you put on this feature.

@Frank
Am I right to assume that it is save to adopt the title field tags you link to in your post above (under 4)?

Hi all,

I've run into this problem too - I have taxonomic names of species in the titles of journal articles that NEED to be in italics. Is there a solution for this yet, or will it be in v2.1x?

Martin.

Has this issue been resolved? It's really important for humanities citations.

Well, this is not very easy. I just moved my library from Endnote to Zotero (standalone version for use with Safari), and it seems that Zotero's solution is really geeky. Endnote has an "edit font" menu to solve this and it never occurred to me that Zotero would not have a similar pull-down menu. This is especially odd considering that Zotero has been developed by a humanities consortium. I love all of Zotero's features and find the program superior in most ways to Endnote, but this one really needs to be fixed for users like me who need this feature regularly and need it simple. Thanks for your help though.

Putting <i> and </i> around part of a title hardly takes longer than a GUI solution, no? Yes, you need to learn 5 html tags and that may not be ideal, but especially if you're using it a lot hardly seems a show-stopper.

I can promise you Zotero supports this - people are using it actively.
If you're going to insist on a GUI menu you're out of luck unfortunately - generally something more novice friendly might be nice, but there are downsides to cluttering the GUI and it's certainly not high on the priority list of developers.

It's hard to say what's not working in your specific case w/o more detail - to start, both is would have to be lowercase - as in <i>Book Title</i>

First, let's try to work out what is and isn't working. The current solution does require some manual work, but any approach will require some sort of tweaking, since almost none of the formats Zotero imports from have any support for this.

This should work equally well in standalone as in the Firefox version. Enter the title so it looks like:
Citation or partition: subalterity in <i>A guide to Polish bibliographic practice</i>
Then try again. If it doesn't work, right-click (control-click on a Mac) on the item in the middle pane of Zotero and select "Export this item". Select "Zotero RDF" as the format, and save the item. Then open the file and paste its contents here. Something funny is going on if it won't work.

As for the convenience of the current markup system-- it's not pretty, and we need to add more guidance on how to use it, but there's no way to do this without using some convention of some sort, and this convention is familiar enough to be recognizable for many.

@weamon: I've read through your reactions to our solution for italics (and other in-field markup). Just a few comments by way of information:

(1) The markup scheme grew out of work by a bioscientist who, like you, needed to mark up species names. He had been inserting markup into fields, and then running a Word macro over his document to apply the formatting. We use the same tags (<i>italics</i> etc), but apply the formatting automatically when the citations are inserted into the document.

(2) The solution above is not yet polished, but it can be polished. The polishing will take some time. We hope you'll bear with us, but if you decide to revert to EndNote, check back from time to time, because with steady feedback from the community (of which we hope you will remain a member) this feature (and many others) will improve.

(3) If you are having difficulties with in-field formatting, please follow the steps indicated by adamsmith (edit: ajlyon [oops]). If we can look at your actual data, we will have a better chance of giving meaningful advice.

ajlyon's solution seems to work. Thank you. It's a little inelegant, but it will do until a better solution is found. What I would hope for is some sort of pull-down menu with editing options that would include italics and other markup, similar to Endnote. But the other features of Zotero make it far superior (for me) that I much prefer it over Endnote and will definitely stay around, hoping for a fix for this (minor) inconvenience. Response on the Forum has been very helpful.