Upgrade Storage[Beta] Capitalization after Colons
I'd like Zotero folks to rethink this feature. Every journal style I know of requires journal titles in a bibliography to be in sentence case, with a lowercase word following a colon (unless that word is a proper noun). Making this the default behavior for this item type seems like a step backwards. Almost every time I switch the case automatically (usually as the result of an item that was imported in title case, which happens a lot) and there's a colon in a paper I'd need to change the capital letter to lowercase.
Could this behavior be turned off in the case of journal articles? Alternatively, could we get the ability, perhaps in a hidden preference, to not capitalize after colons? The second way would require manual editing for books or other item types, but for those of us for whose library the vast majority of items are journal articles, it would save a huge amount of manual editing.
Could this behavior be turned off in the case of journal articles? Alternatively, could we get the ability, perhaps in a hidden preference, to not capitalize after colons? The second way would require manual editing for books or other item types, but for those of us for whose library the vast majority of items are journal articles, it would save a huge amount of manual editing.
Still, I don't really understand the rationale for this change. After all, if the style calls for capitalization after a colon, the CSL already converts it, right? So why wouldn't you want to store it as a lowercase, and let the style handle any conversions to capitals as necessary, which would maintain the ability for those styles that don't use capitalization to be correct?
You can't just do the conversion the other way, either. For example, a paper like:
Ripple, W. J., and R. L. Beschta. 2005. Linking wolves and plants: Aldo Leopold on trophic cascades. BioScience 55:613–621.
Having a style do the conversion to lowercase would cause Aldo to not be capitalized in the reference.
I agree about the preference being confusing if the function is not prominently displayed. However, if there is a button for calling the Transform Text function in the metadata pane, would a preference for "Capitalize titles after colons when changing case" be less confusing?
As an alternative, could this preference be a check box in the Transform Text dialog itself? I'm not sure if Mozilla supports this kind of interface.
To implement this, however, I think we should first implement rich text editing in fields with an option (on the pop-up) to switch to raw HTML view, just like we do in Notes (and we could probably even use TinyMCE to accomplish all of this)
I also should probably add that capitalization after colons is the only thing at issue here. All styles capitalize after ? and ! in titles -- as does proper sentence case, I assume, since they're delimiters of new sentences anyway -- so that functionality should definitely remain.
Unfortunately the discussion about the details of handling this in citation styles has stalled to some degree, but I'll try to revive it once the next CSL version comes into sight. For those interested, it's here: http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/Sentence-case-variants-td7578968.html
*obviously since this was one line of code change in the first place
Really sorry for all the APA folks. I wish I could promise you a quick fix via CSL, but while that is going to happen eventually, it's not going to happen soon. Apologies.
I fully understand that it is generally desirable to avoid a proliferation of hidden preferences as much as possible (as mentioned by adamsmith earlier). However, considering that the code for both behaviours exists then considering that a fix via CSL is unlikely to happen anytime soon, this would seem like a very good temporary solution (unless the preference would be time-consuming to implement).
As for the patch add-on: I'm a little wary of what that's going to do. I realize it's just a plugin, but in order to work with styles from the CSL repository, it would have to transform titles with no title-case attribute set. That seems rather odd to me and I think to hackish even as a stop-gap.
@Frank - didn't you say there is a way to use subtitles in citeproc? Is that exposed in the official version? If so, I'd suggest putting together an unofficial APA style that uses that and people like bwiernik and ttamm could use that - since that's most likely also going to be the route we'll eventually go with this that seems like a lot cleaner solution.
Is there any way of using the transform text option to sentence case to capitalize the first letter of the first word after a colon (APA style)? Going through all my references manually, transforming text to sentence case is slow enough. Then adding the capitalization really is tedious.
Currently there's no good options for this. sorry.
It doesn't add anything to the UI. When the plugin is installed and enabled, it will uppercase the first character of the subtitle (the portion of the title after the first colon) if and only if the Short Title field exactly matches the main title (the portion before the first colon). The upper-casing happens in rendered citations: in accordance with the consensus reached in the thread, subtitles entered in sentence case, with the first character in lower-case, will be left as is in Zotero proper.
This isn't a complete solution, since the upper-casing will take effect indiscriminately for all styles; but the small extension that it adds to the CSL processor can be invoked more selectively when control over this is added to the CSL language at a later date.
(Edit 2015-9-6: changed link to point at current location.)
Entering the main title exactly in the Short Title field comes from a suggestion Dan Stillman made when the need for discrete treatment of subtitles was discussed, quite awhile back.