Does Zotero convert single straight quotes to curly? And can I turn this off?

pooranis

I am generating a bibliography in Zotero by highlighting the references, right clicking "Create Bibliography from Items...", choose style, language (English (US)) copy to clipboard and pasting in rtf file or Word. I have also tried using the Style Editor/Preview in Zotero options. In both cases, I notice that single straight apostrophes that are internal to a title (so part of the item record itself, not the surrounding quotes provided by the citation style) are converted to curly. Straight double quotes are not converted, and curly double quotes are also preserved (as expected).

I'm trying to trace where the quotes are changing. When I export the reference to CSL JSON, the single quotes are straight - I have edited the title a few times, even carefully pasting in a straight quote from a plain text file. I don't think it's due to the citation style, as I changed the punctuation terms ( https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/translating-locale-files.html?highlight=quote#punctuation ) to be all straight double " or single ' . And, while that did change the format of the quotes surrounding the title, it did not change the internal quotes (also, as expected). It's a bit perplexing as the title also contains Greek characters which are rendered beautifully.

I've tried searching these forums, but it seems most people are having the opposite problem. They would like their quotes to be curly, and I cannot reproduce their solutions in the straight direction. Does anyone know why this happens and how to fix? Thanks.

adamsmith

I thought adjusting the citation style would do, but apparently not. What do you need the straight single quote for? THere might be a workaround.

pooranis

The punctuation terms have some influence, but I can't figure out the logic for quotes/apostrophes. Here is a (fake) article title:

Fast ‘computation’ of the 'exact null' distribution of Spearman’s ρ and Page's L “statistic” for "samples" with "and“ without 'ties‘.

Here is its rendering in APA 7th ed style which does not set any en-US locale quote terms:

> Fast ‘computation’ of the “exact null” distribution of Spearman’s ρ and Page’s L “statistic” for ‘samples’ with "and“ without ’ties‘.

Here it is in APA with the open and close quote terms set to be " and open and close inner quotes to ' :

> Fast ‘computation’ of the "exact null" distribution of Spearman’s ρ and Page’s L “statistic” for 'samples' with "and“ without ’ties‘.

And for IEEE which quotes article titles:

>“Fast ‘computation’ of the ‘exact null’ distribution of Spearman’s ρ and Page’s L ‘statistic’ for ‘samples’ with "and“ without ’ties‘,”

Setting the quote terms to " and ' :

>"Fast ‘computation’ of the 'exact null' distribution of Spearman’s ρ and Page’s L “statistic” for 'samples' with "and“ without ’ties‘,"


Page*'*s always ends up curly. I thought perhaps this was a config thing that I could change similar to the style punctuation terms.

I am preparing some documents that should only have ASCII characters. I made a citation style that has very basic styling which works well except for this issue. Many of the item titles in this particular set of references have single apostrophes (e.g. "Page's L"). Other special characters are very rare, and I can make a separate sanitized item record by hand in Zotero itself (i.e. using "rho" instead of ρ). I was hoping to avoid doing a Find and Replace on the generated bibliographies all the time just for the apostrophes.
(and also I wanted to understand the logic, so I don't unexpectedly run into weird issues in the future). Thanks!

adamsmith

I'm not sure about the detailed logic for all of these (that's in the unit tests of citeproc and described I think somewhere in its documentation), but I'm afraid you at least currently can't keep Zotero from converting apostrophes to non-ascii characters. The conversion here is unambiguously correct in typographic terms (a straight single quote isn't an apostrophe), though I understand that's inconvenient for your use case.