Upgrade StorageProblems with title case
Hi there,
Here's my issue: I have a _lot_ of primary texts stored with short title abbreviations like "S" or "RN" or "ToB". I'm using MLA and there are a lot of in-text citations of primary texts, so I need them to be relatively unobtrusive. HOWEVER, Zotero reformats my short titles into title case. So, for example, if I have an abbreviated title: (RNNS 30) it turns into (Rnns 30) in the in-text citation. Since it's an abbreviation of the first letters of the title, this is now ungrammatical.
Can anyone offer me any help? Would be much appreciated :)
Best,
Richard
Here's my issue: I have a _lot_ of primary texts stored with short title abbreviations like "S" or "RN" or "ToB". I'm using MLA and there are a lot of in-text citations of primary texts, so I need them to be relatively unobtrusive. HOWEVER, Zotero reformats my short titles into title case. So, for example, if I have an abbreviated title: (RNNS 30) it turns into (Rnns 30) in the in-text citation. Since it's an abbreviation of the first letters of the title, this is now ungrammatical.
Can anyone offer me any help? Would be much appreciated :)
Best,
Richard
Consider titles that contain words (from bio contexts) like "mRNA" (acronym) or "alamarBlue" (registered trademark). The initial letters of either of those should never be capitalized. I can't think of cases where words containing upper case letters or non-alphabet characters (i.e. numbers) should undergo automatic capitalization, but maybe someone can present certain scenarios.
(Edit: Checking the code and then the behavior, I see that the processor already leaves the initial character of mixed-case words untouched in "title" case tranforms, so there's no need for action there.)
"Title Case Conversion
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
...
"Title case conversion (with ``text-case`` set to "title") for English-language
items is performed by:
1. For uppercase strings, the first letter of each word remains in uppercase.
All other letters are lowercased.
2. For lower or mixed case strings, the first letter of each word is uppercased.
Words entirely in uppercase are left untouched."...
So does this mean that the processor *should* be retaining all-caps for acronyms but is not for some reason?
---
- "capitalize-first": capitalizes the first character (other
characters remain in their original case)
- "capitalize-all": capitalizes the first character of every word (other
characters remain in their original case)
---
should read
---
- "capitalize-first": capitalizes the first character of the first word, if the word is lowercase
- "capitalize-all": capitalizes the first character of every lowercase word
---
instead?
https://github.com/citation-style-language/documentation/commit/c34700363a0a05507e191654253151605f31838b
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/21974/problem-with-foreign-language-citation/
Adding the correct information in the "Language" field sorted the problem. Problem did not occur with books I was citing, because book data were imported from Google Books and had the language field completed.
Apologies for wasting people's time!
If your CSL style has default-locale="en" or no default-locale, entries are presumed to be English. In the Language field of each non-English item, enter the two-character code of its language (i.e. "fr" for French, "zh" for Chinese).
If your CSL style has default-locale="fr" (or any other non-"en" value), entries are presumed to be non-English. In that case, set the Language field to "en" for the English entries.
You may wish to set the correct Language value for all of your entries, so that citations will come out correctly regardless of the style applied.
(Edit: No problem; that's why we're a community.)
sentence and capitalize-first: all words beginning with upper case letters (\b[A-Z][a-z]*\b) are lowercased. The first letter of the first word of the sentence is capitalized.
This of course introduces the problem that certain words, like proper nouns, should always have first letter upper-cased. One solution to this would be introduction of <pre> tags, which would prevent any case conversion.
Edit: maybe the condition above can be applied only if the title is entirely in title case. That is, we check that all the words (with the exception of a few skip words like a, the, with, etc.) have first letter in upper case. I understand that it becomes more complex with other languages.
So far, the only citation style we're aware of requiring English titles "as is" is one French citation style.*
On the other hand, problems with proper nouns in sentence case would be a common concern, with many major citation styles requiring sentence case titles.
Yes, we could improve sentence casing by only forcing it on title cased titles, but I'm not sure that's going to create more good then harm.
* And I'll stick to my claim that this is only the case because the editors of that and similar styles don't understand title casing in English. E.g. you'll find many books that have title case titles in the front, but are sentence cased in the LoC, the most authoritative source of bibliographic data. The idea of a "real" casing for titles simply doesn't exist in US publishing (can't say anything about the UK).
Is there any means to (batch) convert the case for the whole library at once? I am not looking forward to going through several hundred entries and changing the case one by one :-(
It just can't auto-convert to sentence case (also, again, auto-conversion is imperfect bc. of proper nouns etc. so you'd have to manually check anyway). There's currently no option to batch edit, no, but it's planned.