Zotero is not implementing my changes to a style

dd123
Hi,

I'm using 3.0.11, on firefox, mac, Word 2011.

I made changes to the American Psychological Assoc. 6 style so that titles would not be formatted as title case, as outlined by Adam Smith here: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10335/titles-should-not-be-capitalized/

In short, this is the change I made to the original:
<macro name="title">
<choose>
<if type="report thesis" match="any">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic" text-case="sentence"/>
<group prefix=" (" suffix=")">
<text variable="genre"/>
<text variable="number" prefix=" No. "/>
</group>
</if>
<else-if type="book speech" match="any">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic" text-case="sentence"/>
</else-if>
<else>
<text variable="title" text-case="sentence"/>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>

I tested the code in a tester (fine), saved it as .csl.txt, dropped it into FF, and it shows up as an option in "document preferences" for a .doc I'm working on. However, it still formats titles as title case, even though the record itself is sentence case. I have confirmed this with multiple references (ie the record is sentence case, but the formatted ref is title case). I have checked the code of the style a few times, and the code I posted above is indeed what is in the style. Zotero IS implementing the change I made to the style so that volume numbers would be excluded from the ref list.

Any help with getting Z to recognize my desired changes would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

David
  • adamsmith
    The APA style that's in the Zotero repository won't capitalize titles.
    What you implement above is to force titles to pseudo-sentence-case.
    Did you try right clicking on an item in Zotero, selecting that style and do "Create Bibliography"? Does that come out right.
    Beyond that we'd need to see a full copy of the file - please paste to gist.github.com as a public gist.
  • dd123
    Hi Adam, thanks for the speedy response.

    I tried right clicking and pasting a single ref, and it does not implement my attempt to use sentence case.

    I have pasted it here:
    git://gist.github.com/4183363.git

    Re the APA style in the repository. I will download it and try it out. I did try updating my version of Zotero, hoping that would reflect recent changes to APA style, but I guess that isn't how it works.

    Thanks!

    David
  • dd123
    edited December 1, 2012
    To clarify in case this isn't obvious, I'm trying to use sentence case for book titles.

    Edit:

    I have downloaded the APA 6 style from the repository, made my little change regarding volume numbers, and for all intents and purposes, my issues are resolved. I'm curious to know what I did wrong earlier, but that's just gravy.

    Thanks for your super quick help. I appreciate it so much! And thanks for making that change to APA 6's sentence case of book titles issue.
  • adamsmith
    you were looking at book titles for chapters, right? That just wasn't affected by what you did - if you look at l. 385 of the style version you put on github, you see that it still applies title case to the book title (the variable called container-title). You only sentence-cased the primary title - i.e. the title of the chapter/article/report/book cited in its entirety etc.
  • dd123
    Ah! I should have read through more carefully. Thanks!

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