CSL: Text case of particles

bwiernik

Is CSL able to accommodate changing text cases of particles across contexts. For example the Dutch non-dropping particle "van" should generally be in uppercase if the name is inverted or surname-only, but should be in lowercase if shown following the given name:
Van Smeden, M.
M. van Smeden

Is it possible to handle both cases without changing item data in CSL?

djross3

(There is also a rare but troubling case where if you do allow out-of-parentheses usage of names, the V should be capitalized iff it is the first word in a sentence. I have a special Word macro to deal with the out-of-parentheses case for names, but haven't tried to solve the first-word-in-sentence issue. Although that functionality is still under development for Zotero, it seems that CSL should in principle be able to handle that also, although I don't know how. All I can imagine is a special checkbox to handle this very rare case, which seems extreme, but I don't know if there are any alternatives. In principle it could happen within-parentheses too, if there is a stand-alone parenthetical citation formatted as a full sentence using the suffix field. Maybe even more common in footnotes actually, if that capitalization is preferred by some styles.)

Of course problematically I believe the standards vary based on the origin of the name (e.g., Dutch vs. German vs. Spanish, etc.) but I'm not certain about the details.

adamsmith

I don't think this is possible, no. There's a long discussion on the details of this somewhere -- which, as djross points out, get more complex yet because "van" doesn't behave the same way depending on the origin of the name.