Document renaming from meta data should not be localized

torbjoernklatt · April 18, 2012

Given Zotero either as FF plugin or standalone with FF being localized to system's language.
And given an item with exactly two authors, year and title and a document (e.g. PDF) underneath it.
When renaming the PDF according to the meta data (right click on document), the resulting document / file name should not be localized.

Example:
I've got a German FF and given such an item with two autors, the document will be renamed like "AuthorName1 und AuthorName2 - Year - Title.pdf". The 'und' is German for 'and'. This is not nice. I'd like to have "AuthorName1, AuthorName2 - Year - Title.pdf".

Proposed solution:
The user should be able to choose the scheme for renaming associated documents.

dstillman · April 18, 2012

You can choose the scheme—in a very limited fashion, currently—but the creator part is currently a single component that follows the current locale. When we add more options to the format string discussed in that thread, we might be able to offer some unlocalized options.

I'd also be happy to consider changing the default if there was a strong argument against the current behavior, but no one has complained about this before, and changing the default might not be great for users with lots of existing files.

onedayonenoodle · April 21, 2012

I agree with torbjoernklatt. In my case, 'Author1 and Author2' became 'Author1 と Author2' for English-wirtten articles (i.e. 'and' was translated into 'と' in Japanese). Although I basically use English version of Zotero, I was still annoyed.

I found a string 'and' (String ID: general.and) which was translated into 'と' in zotero/zotero.properties/Japanese (Japan) (ja_JP) on Transifex. I assumed that this was the string used for renaming function and that everyone would hate this use of 'と'. So changed the string back to 'and'.

dstillman · April 21, 2012

onedayonenoodle: Please don't do that. First, "general.and" is exactly what it sounds like: a generic, locale-specific "and" that can be used for various things, including things within the Zotero interface itself. And even if it were specific to the renaming function, it would still be inappropriate to make a change like that unilaterally based on a personal preference. If you don't like how a feature works, complain about it here and we'll be happy to discuss it. Don't put an English string into a non-English locale. That's a bug.

I've reverted your change on Transifex.

fbennett · April 21, 2012

That string is also used to generate the author listings in the center panel. A user handling primarily Japanese material in a Japanese interface would be equally annoyed to have entries listed as "我妻栄 and 鈴木禄彌" (although "と" could arguably be replaced by "・" for readability).

The right way to fix this would be through the format mechanism linked by Dan above (or some extension to it if it is not satisfactory). The localization string for "and" should adhere to the target language, so that other parts of the UI don't get clobbered.