Exporting item to biblatex: quotation marks aren’t properly nested in bibliography

wush1

Some titles have quotation marks in them. When I export such an entry from zotero, in a minimal document, it might look like this (the space after the @ is to prevent the forum software from trying to notify the user “thesis{kohler_gamification_2016”):

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{literature.bib}
@ thesis{kohler_gamification_2016,
location = {Koblenz},
title = {Gamification im Kontext des Fremdsprachenerwerbs: Erstellung eines Software-Prototyps für das Fach „Deutsch als Fremdsprache“},
shorttitle = {Gamification im Kontext des Fremdsprachenerwerbs},
pagetotal = {92},
institution = {Universität Koblenz-Landau},
type = {Diplomarbeit},
author = {Köhler, Jessica},
date = {2016-12-20}
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex-chicago}
\bibliography{literature}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

In the resulting pdf, I get nested double quotation marks („„““) where I expect single quotation marks inside double quotation marks („‚‘“). Manually editing the bibliography entry to have …für das Fach \enquote{Deutsch als Fremdsprache} works, but I’d have to do that every time I export the bibliography from zotero, so it’s not a good option.

Is there a better way to achieve this?

adamsmith

They'd probably disagree, but I think this is principally a biblatex issue: they should handle quotes in titles correctly.
Have you tried using different quotation marks, e.g. straight quotes?

I suppose we could try to implement enquote in biblatex export, but my understanding is that this requires using the csquotes package -- and I'd rather avoid package dependencies for our biblatex export.

wush1

I understand it is more a problem of biblatex than of zotero.
Just for reference, I tried straight quotes, which does not work. But \enquote{} works well without the package csquotes. This is the line:

title = {Gamification im Kontext des Fremdsprachenerwerbs: Erstellung eines Software-Prototyps für das Fach \enquote{Deutsch als Fremdsprache}}

Implementing the \enquote{} command in the title field inside zotero doesn’t work, because the export algorithm removes the backslash. The exported line looks like this:

title = {Gamification im Kontext des Fremdsprachenerwerbs: Erstellung eines Software-Prototyps für das Fach {\textbackslash}enquote\{Deutsch als Fremdsprache\}}

After looking at this question (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/65331/handling-quotes-inside-quotes-in-a-bibliographic-field) on tex.stackexchange.com, I understand that \enquote{} is the proper way to deal with this. While \enquote{} is part of the csquotes package, I don’t have to load it manually in my minimal working example. It might be automatically loaded as a prerequisite of the scrartcl document class (works with article, too) or the filecontents package, but I’m not sure.

Summary: Entries that have quotes in the title lead to erroneous behaviour when exported from zotero. This is due to biblatex requiring \enquote{} instead of actual quotes, so it is basically an issue in latex. While one could manually edit all the corresponding entries, this very much goes against the workflow of zotero (since zotero tries to do all the formatting for you).
Since it is not necessary to manually load the csquotes package into the document for \enquote{} to work, could you implement an automatic syntax from quotes to \enquote{} when exporting to biblatex?

adamsmith

@noksagt -- do you know enough about BibLaTeX to comment on this? Makes sense to me, but I'm not sure how standard/non-standard this is

noksagt

There are BibLaTeX syles that define \enquote, which is probably why this works.
Not all styles do this, though. So: this proposed change may break some documents, but there should be a relatively easy fix.

I'm not aware of any reference manager that transforms quotes to enquote (though, admittedly, many would preserve \enquote if used in the input file).

I don't have a recommendation either way.

emilianoeheyns

BBT will auto-translate those quotes to \enquote if you add them to the config.