Disable automatic capitalisation of French (or foreign) titles in the MHRA style

AmyEForrest

For the MHRA style, Zotero automatically capitalises each main word in a title (and sometimes the lesser words as well), which is expected in English references.

However, book titles (etc.) in French are not capitalised, excluding the first word (and the second word if the first word is 'Le', 'La' or 'Les'). This is not reflected when Zotero inserts references, as it automatically capitalises everything, meaning you have to wait til the last update of a final document to undo all the capitalisations.

Is there any way to disable this automatic capitalisation?

Thanks,
Amy

fbennett

If you put "fr" in the Language field of your French entries, it should disable automatic capitalization.

AmyEForrest

Hi, this doesn't seem to change anything. I've set the doc preferences as the Chicago style, then put it back to the MHRA style, nothing. I've pasted the text into a new document and done the above, still nothing.

Do I need to put the double quotation marks around the fr in order for it to work or should the two letters suffice? Is there something I'm missing?

adamsmith

Frank - do you remember which processor version you put this in? Could this be beta only?
Amy - the fr should not be in quotation marks.

fbennett

It was late here when I wrote, I should have checked. It was in release 1.0.182, released June 24th of this year.

Zotero 2.1.10 has citeproc 1.0.206, but the language variable isn't mapped, so it won't do anything.

adamsmith

meaning this will work in the 3.0b version of Zotero, but not the 2.1.10 version - if you're in a hurry I'd suggest backing-up your library and upgrading to the beta. Otherwise I'd just wait until Zotero 3.0 turns into a final release.

AmyEForrest

thanks, I'm not in a hurry, so I'll wait for 3.0.

Will the new version, when turned into a final release, mean that no matter the overall language of the web browser and therefore of Zotero, the capitalisation will depend on whether fr or eng is entered in each single reference?

fbennett

It will be independent of the language set in the browser and the OS, but you raise a good point. At the moment, capitalization will be suppressed only if the item language is set to a non-English value. But if the style itself has a non-English default-locale, perhaps the default should be not to capitalize. What do you think?

Rintze

@fbennett, didn't we already decide that this should happen? See http://rst.projectfondue.com/api/v1/rst2html/?rst_url=https://raw.github.com/citation-style-language/documentation/master/specification.txt&css_url=http://citation-style-language.github.com/styles/css/screen.css&output_type=html&callback=&document_output=whole&highlight_style=manni#title-case-conversion

fbennett

@rintze: Right you are; and if that's what the spec says, it's probably already implemented.

Rintze

And the ticket that went with it: https://github.com/citation-style-language/documentation/issues/13