Automatically Convert Title to Sentence Case

Rutgers24

Help Needed to Automate Conversion of All Titles to Sentence Case

For many references, I must adjust the Title to sentence case using: right-click->Transform Text-> Sentence case. It could be worse but for a lot of articles, this takes time. It would be incredibly useful if I could select multiple references and transform the Title text to Sentence case or, better yet, set preferences such that Zotero (or some add-on) automatically converts all titles to Sentence case by default. Moreover, it would be wonderful if Sentence case recognized the colon (:) and capitalized the first word after it automatically. e.g., This is the title: This is the subtitle. As it is, this has to be manually fixed even with the right click, one record approach.

Any insights or solutions into this issues would be extremely helpful! Thank you in advance for any help you may be able to provide.

adamsmith

Batch operations are planned but not currently available. The fact that we don't capitalize after the colon is on purpose as that's required in some citation styles (most notably Vancouver/Citing Medicine). There is a workaround using an extension -- @bwiernik you're using that, do you have a link or description at hand?

bwiernik

The plugin is called Propachi-Upper:
https://github.com/Juris-M/propachi-upper/releases/tag/v1.1.65

Store the title in sentence case and be sure the Short Title field exactly matches the part of the title before the colon. With the plugin installed, Zotero will automatically capitalize after the colon.

Rutgers24

@adamsmith @bwiernik
Thank you both so much! Very helpful!

krehbiel

Is this workable only in Firefox? Is there a counterpart for the stand-alone version of Zotero? Thanks.

adamsmith

You can install the same thing into Zotero (Standalone) download the .xpi (right-click --> Save link as) and the install from file under tools add-ons in Zotero.

bwiernik

Though now you will want to install this version of the Propachi plugin https://github.com/Juris-M/propachi-vanilla/releases

jtelkamp

@bwiernik

This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you! However, when I try to add the plugin, it is telling me the current .xpi file (June 2, 2019) is corrupted. Is this the case for everyone? Or am I doing something wrong when installing?

dstillman

@jaketelk: What exactly are you trying to do? Current versions of Zotero already capitalize correctly after colons for APA and similar styles, so you shouldn't need a plugin. See Sentence Casing for details.

(If you're using Firefox, you have to right-click on a Zotero plugin XPI link and save it to disk rather than clicking directly. Otherwise Firefox will try to install it itself and fail. But again, you shouldn't need a plugin here.)

jtelkamp

@dstillman

Thanks for your comment and the link. I am trying to change most of my references to sentence case, or at least cite them in sentence case for APA. I have the most recent version of Zotero and it does not appear the auto-capitalization is working. I'll keep looking though.

adamsmith

There is no auto-sentence casing and there never has been. As per the page dstillman links to, you need to store or manually convert your articles in Zotero to sentence case.

The only thing the add-on did was this:

it would be wonderful if Sentence case recognized the colon (:) and capitalized the first word after it automatically.

and Zotero is now doing that without an add-on.

jtelkamp

That was part of my question. Zotero is not recognizing the colon when I manually change it to sentence case. Do you think there is there a setting I need to change?

adamsmith

I think that's a misunderstanding. You should leave the letter after the colon in lowercase (unless it's a proper noun, of course) and Zotero will handle this correctly in APA style

jtelkamp

Thanks, @adamsmith, I got it now.