Titles all CAPS for some enteries - easy way to convert to lower case?

stevejoslyn

Some of our enteries download with all caps from the publisher or reference search. It isn't a problem until we have to manually go in and rewrite the titles to lowe case so they don't look inconsistent in the bibliography. Does anyone have a simple work around or plug-in.

Thanks

adamsmith

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/zotero-quick-tip-transform-title-text/45575

Also, as I say in the comments, we're always happy to get reports on low-quality imports. In many cases we can fix all caps titles on import.

jessriedel

Hey this looks great. Thanks very much, Adam. One request: often when an import has an all-caps title, the author names are also in all-caps. But the "transform text" option doesn't appear when you right-click on author names like it does for titles. Ideally it should and, in addition, there should be an ability to transform *all* the authors at once (in case there are a lot of authors).

Thanks again.

adamsmith

Yeah, making this more widely available is probably a good idea, but you already have the swap option for authors, so it's a bit tricky. There are currently no batch operations at all, so that's still a bit out. But as I say, the real way to fix this is on import, so if you do tell us where you get those faulty imports we'd start there.

jessriedel

Oh right. I think all my all-caps import problems having been coming from World Scientific (which I think is a publisher of many journals). Here's an example of one that Zotero imports with all caps:

http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219749904000195

adamsmith

@aurimas--do you see any reason not to built conversion into atypon?

aurimas

No reason. I'll fix this, but I was just thinking about our general practice of using ZU.capitalizeTitle to fix these issues. The proper way to store titles is in sentence case, so why are we converting to title case instead? Yes, unlike sentence case, title case would not look wrong in Zotero if there were proper nouns in the title (and would not attract attention to correct the title manually), but it would render incorrectly in citation styles calling for sentence-cased titles (leaving the user often confused as to why Zotero doesn't do it correctly). OTOH, converting to sentence case, would still render titles correctly in styles that call for title case, but, I think, would make it more obvious that metadata needs correcting in Zotero.

TL;DR: I think we should be converting titles to sentence case.

aurimas

This is now fixed (went the sentence case route)

Update your translators via Preferences -> General -> Update Now, restart browser, and give it a go.

Thanks for reporting! Let us know if you encounter any other issues.

stevejoslyn

Hi Aurimas and Adam,

Any chance you can have a "Apply to entire database" or "Force title case on all imports"?

Or do you think having the styles do this automatically is easier?

Thanks again

Steve

adamsmith

Batch operations are not currently possible for anything, so no to "apply to entire database" (though allowing that would be nice). I think it's a bit tricky to do on all imports, though that might be an option. Generally I prefer going one translator at a time -- where are you getting all caps import from?