Questions about converting to/from sentence casing
Over the past decade, I've added sources to my Zotero libraries using the identifier tool (DOI/ISBN), browser plugin, and manual entry with few issues. Recently, however, I've had issues where I BibTeX throws errors because my .bib files contain titles with curly brackets around any capitalized words, e.g. title = {The art of {War}}. The likely culprit here is a change to a different style. I'm using BetterBibTeX.
Based on advice here and further reading, this is an issue with the casing of the title field. When records are added to my library, they are added using "Title Case" rather than "Sentence Casing." During export, capitalized words are then (in most circumstances) enclosed in curly brackets.
Although I can fix this by converting my titles to "Sentence Case," in my Zotero library by manually right-clicking a record's title and selecting this option, this is undesirable for two reasons.
First, I have to manually do this for each record. As I have over 5,000 records, this will take awhile!
Second, this converts some words that should be capitalized to lower-case. However, when I manually change these words (in my Zotero library) to their proper upper-case, BiBTeX once again throws errors because it wraps curly brackets around these as well.
Accordingly, I have two questions:
1. Is there any way to batch/bulk change all of the titles for some record to sentence case from title case?
2. Is there some way to maintain the correct upper case for e.g. proper nouns without adding the brackets during export? Manually changing my .bib file is undesirable since I often overwrite it with an updated version, so I am looking for a mechanism within Zotero.
Based on advice here and further reading, this is an issue with the casing of the title field. When records are added to my library, they are added using "Title Case" rather than "Sentence Casing." During export, capitalized words are then (in most circumstances) enclosed in curly brackets.
Although I can fix this by converting my titles to "Sentence Case," in my Zotero library by manually right-clicking a record's title and selecting this option, this is undesirable for two reasons.
First, I have to manually do this for each record. As I have over 5,000 records, this will take awhile!
Second, this converts some words that should be capitalized to lower-case. However, when I manually change these words (in my Zotero library) to their proper upper-case, BiBTeX once again throws errors because it wraps curly brackets around these as well.
Accordingly, I have two questions:
1. Is there any way to batch/bulk change all of the titles for some record to sentence case from title case?
2. Is there some way to maintain the correct upper case for e.g. proper nouns without adding the brackets during export? Manually changing my .bib file is undesirable since I often overwrite it with an updated version, so I am looking for a mechanism within Zotero.
2. the braces are actually the right thing to do, and if your bibtex run is producing errors for those, you'll want to address the errors that it reports, not the presence of the technically and semantically valid (and necessary) braces. If you insist on removing them, this can be achieved with the better bibtex plugin (which you'll want anyhow if you want to work with bibtex and zotero), but this should really be a fallback workaround, not the solution to your problem.