How to ignore proper nouns when rename title of PDF file as sentence case?

dstillman

This discussion was created from comments split from: Now available: Zotero 7.

ysliu87

How to ignore proper nouns, such as Tibet, America, Asia, when rename title of PDF file as sentence case?

dstillman

(Please start new threads for new issues — the thread you posted to isn't related. I've moved this to a new thread.)

See Sentence Casing:

Unfortunately, it's not possible for Zotero or any other tool to reliably automate conversion to sentence case, since a computer can't know for sure that something is a proper noun. (Think, for example, of the word “united”, which can be an adjective, verb, name of a company, or part of a country name.)

That's why this has to be a manual step that you then correct.

ysliu87

However, the EndNote seems to have such function by adding some proper nouns.
It ignore these proper nouns when rename PDF title as sentence case.

dstillman

I don't know what EndNote does, but read what I quoted above — even a giant list of words wouldn't be reliable way of knowing what's a proper noun. So while some proper nouns could be kept as capitalized, you'd still have to manually review each entry and make various corrections. This just can't be automated. (The only semi-reliable way would be a large language model, and in our testing even recent powerful models make mistakes here.)