apostrophe in title changed to double quote in footnote

Larisa

When I look in my footnotes in Word, I see a title:

There Ain"t no Black in the Union Jack

when I look in Zotero, it says:

There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack

how can I make it use a quotation mark correctly?

I'm using the latest Zotero, with Firefox, and Word 2008 for Mac.

adamsmith

you've used a single quote - ’ - instead of an apostrophe - ' - in the title in Zotero. The processor flips quotes from single to double and vv depending on the style.
If you change the single quote to an apostrophe this should work correctly.

Larisa

Thanks for your quick response!

Sorry for my ignorance, but how do I do that? I only have one key on my keyboard that lets me provide a ' so I don't know if it's a single quote or an apostrophe.

adamsmith

you can copy them from above. On a US-English keyboard you have the apostrophe on the key next to the colon/semicolon.

Larisa

hm. that's what i was using though.
I re-inserted it multiple times. Just tried it again from copying and pasting.

Could it be because the full title is 'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation

As you can see there are single quotes (or apostrophes, again i have no keyboard way to distinguish them) around the phrase before the colon.

adamsmith

yeah, that's it. I don't know if this can be fixed - Zotero won't properly handle these cases if you use single quotes with a style that typically uses double quotes.
If you change the quotes to double quotes this will work. Also, if you use a UK style that uses single quotes (e.g. around articles) this will work. But you can't get single quotes for book titles in a style that otherwise calls for double quotes.

aurimas

In this particular case, this is probably a bug in the csl processor. Opening and closing quotes should only have one alphanumeric character flanking them. I think. The apostrophe here should not be considered a quotation mark

fbennett

This could be handled better, but do try using outer double-quotes in this case and see what happens (as adamsmith suggests). If that doesn't work, I'll take a closer look.

fbennett

Discriminating on flanking characters would only be a partial solution, since possessives can occur at the end of a word (i.e. "the Jones' house").

Bente_Shoen

Using MLA 8 style I have a related problem. In a book section entitled:

"The Dogs' Colloquy in the picaresque"

I get the following output:

“The Dogs’’ Colloquy in the Picaresque” [also, after Dogs’’, the richtext code for "close italics" appears in the output]

So, the apostrophe is converted to a quotation mark, part of the richtext code appears in the output, and the entire title is shown in italics rather than just the title-within-a-title that I wish to be italicized.

On the upside, the apostrophe works fine if I remove the italics, but I can find no way to get both the italics and the apostrophe.