Feature request: A simple enhancement of sentence case conversion

igw

I like that recent zotero versions have a basic option to convert the title to sentence case (instead of the earlier option to convert all to lower case). Now, zotero sets the first letter to upper case and transforms everything else to lower case.

A very simple enhancement of this conversion would be to do this additionally: Convert the first letter of words to upper case if they follow ": " and "? "

At least for me that would cover about 95% of all manual edits. For those two part titles in the style of "Topic a: The effect of x on y" or "What is the effect of x on y? An experimental study using the method z", which seem to be very frequent.

Rintze

Note that capitalization after a colon is locale and style-specific: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colon_(punctuation)#Use_of_capitals

igw

I know. I also know that it is impossible to get perfect sentence case transformation. My suggestion would just be to tweak the necessarily imperfect algorithm in a way to reduce the total amount of manual edits that need to be done. As the most frequently used academic styles are MLA, APA, Chicago and their derivations, this will be a capital letter after colons (and question marks).

In terms of the locale, this would be consistent with Zotero's title case transformation which is geared towards english already.

keith.w.larson@gmail

I agree with the above, please add text transformation to other fields including author and editor names.

adamsmith

@keith - that's a separate request - there is a thread on that, too, already (you can probably find it by searching, it was created by DWL-SDCA)

kristjan

I love the text transform text > sentence case function, but I definitely have to agree that it would be even better if it capitalized after a colon, question mark, and exclamation mark.

adamsmith

On the occasion of this related thread: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/28050/apa-6th-ed-issues/#Item_15
I wanted to revive this: I think igw's/kristjan's suggestion makes sense. In almost all situations sentence case requires the subtitle to begin with a capital letter, so uppercasing "after a colon, question mark, and exclamation mark" makes sense.

If there are no objections I'll create a ticket for this.

mc

Also after a full-stop.

adamsmith

no, not after a full stop - that would potentially mess with abbreviations as in
"The U.S. government". Also, in English, where the sentence case distinction is most relevant, periods are very rarely contained in titles.

Rintze

How about a lone hyphen/en-dash/em-dash?

See also http://dissertation.laerd.com/style-guides-for-dissertation-titles-p2.php : "A subtitle should be separated using a colon or em dash (i.e., — and not the shorter - en dash) and then a single space (i.e., Title: Subtitle OR Title — Subtitle)."

mc

True, though I rarely see abbreviations with full stops any more ("The US government"?).

The more I think about this, the more I prefer the current implementation.

(The again, the APA style is a *guide* rather than a law... and even in journals that use it, it is "more honored in the breach than in the observance")

Edit: Sorry that last comment was in reference to another post about capitalisation and APA, not this post.

adamsmith

True, though I rarely see abbreviations with full stops any more ("The US government"?).

The LoC has >10,000 titles with U.S. in the title. Personally I'd also write US and USA, but I think it's pretty clear that titles with periods in abbreviations are much more common than those in which periods separate the subtitle or are otherwise used as punctuation marks in the title.

The again, the APA style is a *guide* rather than a law... and even in journals that use it, it is "more honored in the breach than in the observance"

Oh, I'm least worried about the journals - if your citations have formal errors in a journal submission the copy editor is going to catch that. To my great chagrin, there is a large fraction of university professors who lower grades for incorrect APA citations, including at the graduate level. It boggles my mind that anyone would do that, but especially among APA followers this is quite common and I'd like to help students who have to suffer such teachers as much as possible.

How about a lone hyphen/en-dash/em-dash?

I don't have astrong opinion on this. Generally I'd say no: It's nothing I've ever seen and since MARC requires a colon we're unlikely to see the em-dash delimiter much for automatic imports (and for manual entry users can get capitalization right themselves). I'd also worry that em-dash-delimited interjections are used in some of the clever titles that some humanities disciplines like.

The more I think about this, the more I prefer the current implementation.

Why? What's wrong with capitalizing after colon, excl. mark and q mark?

Gracile

(Just want to repeat what Rintze said: capitalization after a colon is locale specific.)

DWL-SDCA

Since I weighed in earlier with an ambiguous comment on another thread, let me say that I wholeheartedly endorse making the first character of a subtitle in upper case. Perhaps, this can be controlled by the language label.

I teach seminars in citation, plagiarism, and Zotero at the undergrad and graduate level. I can echo the comments about lowering grades for slightly incorrect casing in APA citation titles. I can even point to two profs who insist that students' use an earlier APA revision when submitting papers because the professors "know" it better than the latest revision. Anything that can be automated to assist data entry will be greatly appreciated by students.

adamsmith

(Just want to repeat what Rintze said: capitalization after a colon is locale specific.)

For the transform text I'm not particularly worried about that: Since title case only exists in English, most non-English sources come properly cased in the first place - I checked a number of French and Spanish translators and all of them have titles in sentence case in the tests. So for the transform to sentence case function I see no problem changing the behavior.
I don't see how we'd localize this reasonably.

The other question is import. The most common source for lower case after colon are library catalogs. My initial impulse was to fix that, but given that this differs on locales that may not be a good idea. I just checked and in Spanish bibliographies colons are consistently followed by lowercase letters. (Also subtitles are typically separated by periods, but that's another can of worms).

adamsmith

ticket created for transform text
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/293