Make locale a document level setting

mronkko

Many researchers whose are not native english speakers do some of their writing in their native language. For example, for me in a normal day there might be up to half a dozen transition between writing something in English and writing something in Finnish. Switching Zotero language trough the about:config screen gets tedious.

Because the language of a document determines what locale the bibliography should use, locale should be made a document level setting similarly to citation style.

ajlyon

I believe that MLZ does this.

fbennett

It's a client-level setting in MLZ, but it you customize the styles you use, you could make versions that are tied to particular languages. Some relevant links:

https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#the-root-element-cs-style

That should work in official Zotero as well.

adamsmith

I'm sure mronkko is aware of the per-style default-locale option - question is where Zotero should take the language for styles without a default-locale. Mikko works a lot with APA style and it'd be nice to just have that working in whatever language the document is.
Are there any potential downsides? Like, could there be people writing in en-GB English using en-US styles (single quotation marks and position of commas being the main differences)?

mronkko

One extra settings adds complexity for those who always work with the same locale, but other than that I do not see much downsides.

adamsmith

so you'd enable that via hidden pref, am I understanding your last post right?

mronkko

Well, I would probably just make it available for everyone as a default setting. Hidden prefs are difficult to find for a casual user.

adamsmith

but then how do you turn it off? As in my example above, e.g. for someone from the UK using APA style? There needs to be a switch, no? And if so, it would likely be a rarely used switch and the prefs are pretty crowded as it is already.

mronkko

I would have locale as a dropdown in the document preferences window in the Zotero word processor plugin. Default value set to Zotero locale or style locale if a style defines a default locale.

I do no think that it is technically possible to detect the document language automatically because, as far as I know, in Word language is not a document level setting.

fbennett

(I didn't pick up that the post was by Mikko. Apologies!)

For MLZ, I agree that it would make sense to add the bibliography language setting to the other document language preferences. It will be a month or two before I can get to it, but I'll put it on the list.

adamsmith

I think what Mikko suggests also makes sense for vanilla Zotero. That dialog isn't too bad I think.

dstillman

Yes, this can be submitted as a pull request to standard Zotero.

mronkko

I might give it a shot at some point.

harmo

Any news on this? It would be wonderful to have the language setting in the word processor settings. Meanwhile, the option seem to be either to use the Zotero bibliography Locale Switcher, or to create language-specific styles by just changing the default-locale attribute in the style. For our students, the latter would seem very user friendly, but would it be too much trouble in the long run (maintanence)?

Ortin

Sorry I don't know how to delete a comment.