Excessive Capitalization Of Citation Titles

belka247
Hi Zotero users,

This new version of Zotero, to my great dismay, capitalizes each and every letter of the citation, including the articles! And different languages have different capitalization rules.

How can I stop Zotero from implementing this forced capitalization? Is it possible for someone with limited technical/coding skills to do? (I use Chicago Manual of Style.)
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  • adamsmith
    You can disable capitalization for an item by putting the respective language code in the language field - e.g. de (or de-DE) for German, es or es-SP for Spanish, fr-FR for French etc.
  • belka247
    Thanks. I installed an older version of the style. Seems to have worked. Anyway, articles should not be capitalized, even in English. So hopefully the next version will fix this problem.
  • adamsmith
    which English articles are capitalized? That shouldn't be the case.
    I would strongly recommend you don't use an old version of the style and instead follow my advice. You'll be on your own with anything style related if you rely on outdated version of the style.
  • belka247
    well, articles like Of and The, etc. and "little words" like And. All of those were capitalized in the citation. Ok, I'll try to follow your advice. I find it a little difficult though, looking through all that code. Do you know if a new fixed-up version is forthcoming?
    Thank you.
  • adamsmith
    That is odd. English articles are specifically excluded from capitalization, and that works correctly for all of us. You are sure that's happening? What would be an example citation? Have you tried re-installing the style from the Zotero repository?

    As for language - I'm not sure what "all that code" refers to. You're not supposed to touch the code for the style - the two letter codes go into the language field in Zotero and they are only necessary for non-English works.
  • belka247
    Ok, it was in French. Sorry. So I put fr in the language field, but my citation still comes out wrong. Was there something else I was supposed to do?
  • adamsmith
    that should work and be all - have you tried refreshing the document (assuming the citation is in a document?). If you right-click on the item and create a bibliography -> does it look right then?
  • belka247
    Yes that worked after I refreshed again. Thank you so much for your help!
  • belka247
    It's doing the thing again where it's capitalizing all articles and smaller words in my French citations. Even though I've entered FR in the language field! Was something changed again?
  • adamsmith
    no, nothing changed. While this may be overly restrictive, Zotero's parsing of the language field is case-sensitive. You need to use fr-FR or just fr. FR won't work.
  • belka247
    Ok, great. That did the trick. Thanks.
  • RintzeRintze
    I created a Knowledge Base entry as this question might come up again (adamsmith, feel free to improve on it).

    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/preventing_title_casing_for_non-english_titles
  • adamsmith
    good idea - looks good, too (no surprise there).
    We should remember to update it once citeprocs parsing behavior of the language field changes (did Frank already implement that?) and the changes make it into Zotero. My understanding is that we will still recommend the ISO two letter codes, but we should probably explain that other languages work, too.
  • dstillman
    When we update it, we should also note that the language codes aren't necessary when using a non-English bibliography locale.

    Frank's changes are already in the dev build and should be in 3.0.4.
  • RintzeRintze
    edited March 9, 2012
    @Dan Stillman, yes. For future reference, the next version of the CSL specification will address this as well. Relevant section in the trunk copy of the spec: http://goo.gl/jTBNn
  • Arithmeticus
    OK, but what about an item whose title consists of text in two different languages?

    Also, does this mean that the language field describes the title of the book, not its content? This could be confusing to users. For example, many critical editions of Greek texts are published with Latin titles.
  • adamsmith
    OK, but what about an item whose title consists of text in two different languages?
    You input a non-English language code and Zotero leaves capitalization alone - that's all we can do at this point and probably for the foreseeable future.

    In all but a very few cases, it doesn't matter whether "language" refers to the title or the work in general - I'm going to go out on a limp and say we're not going to introduce different capitalization for classic Greek and Latin - since "language" is a variable accessible via CSL, I'd generally recommend it to refer to the content, not the title when the two are not the same.

    People working with a large amount of non-English works with English titles should probably have the language refer to the title, but honestly - how many people are going to be affected by that?
  • fbennett
    @Arithmeticus: Interesting questions.

    The best use of the language field is to indicate the language of the underlying work. The case you raise, of a source written in one language, but titled in another, is beyond the scope of current language support, but would be smoothly handled in multilingual Zotero (MLZ). In MLZ, it is possible to set language codes for individual metadata fields (and to add parallel language-tagged fields for alternative representations of the same information), so the item would have language Greek, and the title would have language Latin.

    For an items with titles in two or more languages, tagging the language of individual sections of text is not practicable, of course. The processor does recognize a markup syntax for suppressing title-case changes on a range of text; if the demand for this becomes strong enough, that may be brought into play. If the number of items affected is small, it's probably simpler to just touch up the entries before final submission.
  • mirnawasef
    that was very useful saved me hours worth of work!

    so when I export a bibliography it works and every first letter is capitalizes except for articles which is perfect.
    however is there a way to have that in the zotero library as well? i.e where I have inserted Titles and subtitles?
  • adamsmith
    no - the whole point is that you're _not_ saving it in title case in Zotero. Why does the capitalization of titles in Zotero itself matter?
  • nickbart
    edited October 16, 2013
    @fbennett: You wrote
    The processor does recognize a markup syntax for suppressing title-case changes on a range of text.
    What is that markup syntax?

    For pandoc, implementing the very same thing has been proposed, and it'd be a good idea to use the same syntax.
  • fbennett
    edited April 12, 2017
    It's not pretty, but this is what the processor will recognize:
    The title word in <span class="nocase">lowercase</span>
    Here are some test fixtures:
  • Jonathan Mills
    edited April 12, 2017
    Thanks fbennett. Zotero was capitalizing "its" in one of my titles and this html code fixed it.
    Just one small correction: there is no / in the first field code following "nocase".
  • fbennett
    edited April 12, 2017
    Jonathan: Yikes, of course. Fixed!
  • lisarbei
    edited October 24, 2022
    If Zotero doesn't capitalize all words that are needed in Spanish, for example "Julián de zulutea y amondo: promotor del capitalismo en cuba" instead of "Julián de Zulutea y Amondo: Promotor del capitalismo en Cuba", should I use HTML code or there are also other options for me?

    UPD: It was my mistake, I put incorrect capitalization in Zotero.
  • lisarbei
    It was my mistake, I put incorrect capitalization in Zotero.
  • lisarbei
    In bibliography, Zotero capitalizes some words from the "Edition" line which shouldn't be capitalized. For instance, 'Ed.' and 'Compl.' in the following cases:

    ———. Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei: Eine Globalgeschichte von den Anfängen bis heute. 2nd ext. and rev. Ed. 2 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

    ——. L’institution de l’esclavage: Une approche mondiale. Ed. rev. and Compl. by Valérie Lécrivain. Paris: Gallimard, 2018.

  • bwiernik
    Be sure that you have entered “de” in the language field for these items to indicate they are German and not English
  • adamsmith
    No, the titles are right, it's the edition information ("Ed. rev. and Compl. by") -- I'll have to test: we're applying "capitalize-first" there, which shouldn't be doing this, but it's possible it's a bug.
  • lisarbei
    Is it possible to fix it? I still have problems with this "Ed. rev. and Compl. by" issue.
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