Capitalization of hyphenated words in titles for CMOS citations

jbauchner

Hi all,

It seems like recently a new text processor was added to Zotero recently that correctly transforms the latter element or elements of hyphenated words in titles to having a capital letter for CMOS citations (e.g., Twenty-Two, Twelfth-Century). See https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/32086/the-capitalized-after-colon-but-not-aan/ and https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/25468/capitalize-after-non-part-of-title/. This is good, but doesn't fit the rule, per CMOS 8.159, exactly (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch08/ch08_sec159.html).

Words such as "Post-revolutionary," "Co-evolution," "Bed-and-Breakfast," and "E-flat" have elements in the second or later positions that should not be capitalized. Is there any way to edit the text processor, specifically the rules that govern text-case="title," for my own Zotero? Or does this have to be changed for the processor as a whole? If so, can I make a request that it gets updated? It seems that if the text transform can accurately do prepositions and conjunctions for nonhyphenated words in titles, it should be able to follow CMOS 8.159. But maybe not.

Thanks for your help! And keep up the great work.

jhb

EDIT: 2014-01-18 11:36 EST: "'Ben-and-Breakfast'" to "'Bed-and-Breakfast'" Ben-and-Breakfast! Ha!

aurimas

(this is an unofficial hack) You can currently wrap the words (or letters, I guess) that you do not want title-cased in <span class="nocase"> </span> HTML tags. It doesn't look nice in Zotero, but it should produce correct titles in bibliographies/footnotes. It's practically impossible for Zotero to get all of such title-casing rules correctly.

For reference and more details, see http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/title-casing-skip-words-tp7578629p7578843.html (and the surrounding discussion)

adamsmith

You can't just edit the title-casing rules, no.
I don't think we'll try to fix this - there are limits as to the amount of detail we can built into such a function. Bed-and-Breakfast is already coming out right, but I just don't see how we'll properly deal with and recognize prefixes, which are much less clearly defined than preposition (see, e.g. the E-flat example)

jbauchner

Thanks very much! Yes, it's a very small thing, so I don't think it's necessarily worth the time. "Post-revolutionary" and "Co-evolution" are the ones that I had noticed—and I bet there's not a simple list out there of prefixes and combining forms that indicate no cap on the second element.