Title case questions

birne75

Hello,

two quick questions:

(1) Is there a way to make the settings for title case in the case of container titles language-specific?

My style has set title case for all container articles, but of course the rules are then applied to German journals and edited volumes. Is it possible to set the container language separately from the item language?

If not, I guess I better don't set case="title" for container titles, but rather type this in Zotero as they should appear each according to the actual container language?

(2) I noticed that certain prepisitions like "beyond" were not capitalized in title case. I was under the impression from the CSL specifications that only preposition, conjunction, etc. up to four letters were left in lowercase. Did I misunderstand this? Is there a way to manually influence the stop list?

Many thanks in advance,

Daniel

adamsmith

1) https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/preventing_title_casing_for_non-english_titles -- this does mean that you're in a bind if title and container-title are in different languages. You need to use a workaround -- most reliably use the <span class="nocase"> tag, most simply (but less flexibly) store the English title in title case.

2) citeproc-js diverges from the spec (which IMO should be updated) and follows Chicago title casing rules, which lowercases all prepositions, regardless of length

birne75

Thanks a lot.
I think the more reliable trick should work for me best. Thanks!

As for (2), ok, until it is updated I will then just type the respective prepositions with uppercase initial letter.

Many thanks,
Daniel

bwiernik

Field-specific language specification is planned for CSL 1.2

@adamsmith Could you suggest what the title case spec language should be?

adamsmith

Quick draft, needs some polishing. I also suggest not to force lowercase on stop words as the current specs do.

Title case conversion (with text-case set to “title”) for English-language items follows as closely as possible the conventions for headline capitalization of the Chicago Manual of Style (see, e.g., 8.159 in the Manual's 17th edition). It is performed by:

1. For uppercase strings, the first character of each word remains capitalized. All other letters are lowercased.
2. For lower or mixed case strings, the first character of each lowercase word is capitalized. The case of words in mixed or uppercase stays the same.

Lowercase stop words remain lowercased, unless they are the first or last word in the string, or follow a colon. The stop words are the articles "the, a, an", the conjunctions "and, but, for, or, nor," and any preposition regardless of length. A full list of recommended stop words, which may be updated outside of specification updates can be found here.

birne75

Good to know field-specific language specification is planned!