Exporting to BibTeX (using Better BibTeX) changes cases in article titles

typhooncamel

If in Zotero I have a reference with a title in sentence case, no matter what when I export it to a bib file, the exported file capitalizes every word of the title. Is there a way to prevent that from happening?

poettli

How to suppress the capitalization and why the capitalization.

bwiernik

This is the expected behavior—most BibTeX processors expect titles to be supplied in Title Case and will convert to sentence case based on the style. Any words you have stored in uppercase in Zotero will be escaped in the BibTeX output to prevent them being converted to lowercase by the BibTeX processor. You should let this stay as it is.

fuhrmanator

"Any words you have stored in uppercase in Zotero will be escaped in the BibTeX output..."

I don't think this is working in the latest version. I have a reference with an acronym, such as ABcD, in the title and it is not escaped properly when exported to BibTeX, e.g., "ABcD: a new tool for debugging Java" should be "{ABcD}: a new tool for debugging {Java}", right? Is there an option to have this behavior? Perhaps I should ask a different question about this case?

adamsmith

is this Zotero's BibTeX or Better BibTeX's?

bwiernik

No, it should be: "{ABcD}: A New Tool for Debugging {Java}" or "{{ABcD}}: A New Tool for Debugging {{Java}}". As I said above, BibTeX processors expect titles to be stored in Title Case (the opposite of CSL). This is the correct behavior. Exporting it in sentence case would not yield correct output in BibTeX for citation styles that want title cased titles.

fuhrmanator

My bad - Google found me this thread when I was confused about Zotero's default export. I didn't realize there was a Better BibTeX extension, but I'm using it now (it's great!). Sorry for the noise.