Zotero is not implementing my changes to a style

dd123

Hi,

I'm using 3.0.11, on firefox, mac, Word 2011.

I made changes to the American Psychological Assoc. 6 style so that titles would not be formatted as title case, as outlined by Adam Smith here: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10335/titles-should-not-be-capitalized/

In short, this is the change I made to the original:
<macro name="title">
<choose>
<if type="report thesis" match="any">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic" text-case="sentence"/>
<group prefix=" (" suffix=")">
<text variable="genre"/>
<text variable="number" prefix=" No. "/>
</group>
</if>
<else-if type="book speech" match="any">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic" text-case="sentence"/>
</else-if>
<else>
<text variable="title" text-case="sentence"/>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>

I tested the code in a tester (fine), saved it as .csl.txt, dropped it into FF, and it shows up as an option in "document preferences" for a .doc I'm working on. However, it still formats titles as title case, even though the record itself is sentence case. I have confirmed this with multiple references (ie the record is sentence case, but the formatted ref is title case). I have checked the code of the style a few times, and the code I posted above is indeed what is in the style. Zotero IS implementing the change I made to the style so that volume numbers would be excluded from the ref list.

Any help with getting Z to recognize my desired changes would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

David

adamsmith

The APA style that's in the Zotero repository won't capitalize titles.
What you implement above is to force titles to pseudo-sentence-case.
Did you try right clicking on an item in Zotero, selecting that style and do "Create Bibliography"? Does that come out right.
Beyond that we'd need to see a full copy of the file - please paste to gist.github.com as a public gist.

dd123

Hi Adam, thanks for the speedy response.

I tried right clicking and pasting a single ref, and it does not implement my attempt to use sentence case.

I have pasted it here:
git://gist.github.com/4183363.git

Re the APA style in the repository. I will download it and try it out. I did try updating my version of Zotero, hoping that would reflect recent changes to APA style, but I guess that isn't how it works.

Thanks!

David

dd123

To clarify in case this isn't obvious, I'm trying to use sentence case for book titles.

Edit:

I have downloaded the APA 6 style from the repository, made my little change regarding volume numbers, and for all intents and purposes, my issues are resolved. I'm curious to know what I did wrong earlier, but that's just gravy.

Thanks for your super quick help. I appreciate it so much! And thanks for making that change to APA 6's sentence case of book titles issue.

adamsmith

you were looking at book titles for chapters, right? That just wasn't affected by what you did - if you look at l. 385 of the style version you put on github, you see that it still applies title case to the book title (the variable called container-title). You only sentence-cased the primary title - i.e. the title of the chapter/article/report/book cited in its entirety etc.

dd123

Ah! I should have read through more carefully. Thanks!