Words with hyphens in titles when exporting to bibtex are capitalized

alexlex

Hi,

When I have a title such as "Large-Scale Analysis of..." the Zotero export to bibtex produces "{Large-Scale} Analysis of...", which causes my bib style to print "scale" capitalized, while other capitalized words are printed in lower case. I'm aware that the brackets are very useful for acronyms, but is there a way to influence this behavior here (without changing the title to lower-case in zotero)?

Thanks,

Alex

adamsmith

why do you not want to change the title to lower (or rather - sentence) case in Zotero?

alexlex

Because that's a manual solution for a specific bib style. If another bibstyle would print the titles with capitalizations, this title would be wrong in this style. I will do it if no alternative exists.

Alex

adamsmith

I don't know how bibtex handles that, but in general the recommendation on Zotero's side is to save all article in sentence case, because it's much easier to convert from sentence to title case than the other way around (i.e. Zotero's citation styles to title case, but don't sentence case, since there is no way to prevent an automatic routine from lowercasing proper names etc.).
I would be surprised if bibtex cannot title case where necessary.

alexlex

Hm, I don't think title-casing is trivial. Most titles only capitalize "important" words, but print words such as "and", "for" or "the" in lower-case. Also, the Zotero's site translators use the Capitalizations provided by the sources, so I would need to manually edit every title if I were to use sentence case consistently.

adamsmith

Hm, I don't think title-casing is trivial. Most titles only capitalize "important" words, but print words such as "and", "for" or "the" in lower-case.

There is a short list of about a dozen words that don't get capitalized - CMoS, e.g. has clearly specified rules for that, which are coded into Zotero. It really is pretty trivial.

so I would need to manually edit every title if I were to use sentence case consistently.

well - every title that's not in sentence case already. Yes. I don't see any alternative to that if you're ever going to use styles that require sentence case.

In any case - to answer your original question: No there is no way to influence that short of customizing the bibtex translator.

alexlex

OK, thanks for the info. As bibtex and Zotero seem to do a fine job with most other not-hyphened words in switching to sentence case, I will manually modify only the hyphened words, as this is far less work for now.

I guess the algorithm used in Zotero to determine whether to surround a word with a set of {} in the bibtex export checks whether there is more than one capital in a string between two white-spaces. Defining a hyphen as a white-space would most likely solve my problem and I cannot think of a reason not to do it. If there were cases, where this would lead to incorrect lower-case spellings, it would be easier and more flexible to surround those with {} in Zotero.

So, in essence, I think this should be the default behavior ;).

adamsmith

I guess the algorithm used in Zotero to determine whether to surround a word with a set of {} in the bibtex export checks whether there is more than one capital in a string between two white-spaces. Defining a hyphen as a white-space would most likely solve my problem and I cannot think of a reason not to do it.

that makes sense to me. I'd like to hear from one of the bibtex powerusers involved in this (who'd also be much faster fixing that in the translator), but if no one shows up I'll eventually have a look.

alexlex

Sounds good, thanks. Let me know when it happens!

adamsmith

This has finally been done. Your translator will update within 24hs or you can update immediately from the general tab of the Zotero preferences.

alexlex

Cool! Works perfectly. Thanks!