Zotero Connector + Overleaf: Case protection for German titles not working

Tobias_Lipinski

Hi everyone,

I am experiencing an issue with title capitalization when using the Zotero Connector to sync my bibliography with Overleaf, in combination with a custom CSL style, and would appreciate any help.

Setup:
- Overleaf with LuaLaTeX compiler
- citation-style-language package
- CSL style: zeitschrift-fur-theologie-und-philosophie
- Zotero with Better BibTeX plugin, synced via Zotero Connector
- The references.bib file in Overleaf is read-only (managed by Zotero Connector)

Problem:
One specific entry is rendered with incorrect capitalization in the citation output. The title "Neutraler Realismus" appears as "Neutraler realismus" in the compiled PDF, even though it is correctly capitalized in Zotero.

The BibTeX entry as exported by Zotero Connector to Overleaf is as follows:

@incollection{2016gabrielNeutralerRealismus,
location = {Freiburg im Br},
title = {Neutraler Realismus},
booktitle = {Neutraler Realismus},
author = {Gabriel, Markus},
editor = {Gabriel, Markus and Buchheim, Thomas},
date = {2016},
series = {Philosophisches Jahrbuch},
number = {2},
publisher = {Karl Alber},
location = {Freiburg im Br},
}

Steps already tried:
- Adding tex.title: {{Neutraler Realismus}} in the Extra field in Zotero (not recognized by Zotero Connector)
- Removing the langid = {german} field in Zotero
- Adding text-case="title" to the CSL style (causes all German titles to be capitalized in English title case, which is undesirable)
- Using double curly braces via Better BibTeX (not transferred by Zotero Connector, which overwrites the formatting)
- The references.bib file cannot be manually edited in Overleaf as it is read-only

The core issue seems to be that the Zotero Connector does not transfer Better BibTeX case-protection formatting to Overleaf, and the CSL processor applies sentence case to the entry, lowercasing "Realismus".

Has anyone encountered this before or found a workaround, ideally without interrupting the Zotero–Overleaf sync?

Thanks in advance!

adamsmith

BBT doesn't have any effect on what you get in Overleaf if you use the direct sync with Zotero (you'd have to instead use BBT automatic export to a synced folder like Dropbox or github and point Overleaf at that).

I don't think that Zotero's built in translators when used via API have the tools to handle this in Bib(La)TeX export, I'm afraid. (What's happening here is that Zotero checks whether a title is in title case and then _doesn't_ automatically apply case protection. Since for this one (pseudo) title case and German case are the same, it doesn't protect capitals).

There's a number of things Zotero could do -- check the language field, respect nocase tags -- but it doesn't currently, largely because BBT handles this well for typical users.

Tobias_Lipinski

Hello, thank you so much for your answer. Just to understand it correctly - there is nothing I can currently do if I want to use the Zotero Connector? Every other citation works great, so I just don't understand what the problem is with this specific entry, exactly.