Stop Capitalizing Titles

Hi, when I insert a citation into Word for Mac 2010 using Zotero (v. 3.0.4), it automatically capitalizes the first letter of every word in the title - even when those letters are not capitalized in the Zotero reference. When book titles are in another language (french, arabic, ect.), only the first letter of the FIRST word should be capitalized according to the chicago manual of style - how do I get Zotero to stop automatically capitalizing these titles?
  • correction: v. 3.0.14
  • For non English titles you can stop Zotero from title casing by inserting the language in the language field of that item. While anything that doesn't start with "en" will work, we recommend using ISO two letter language codes (ISO 639-1), i.e. fr-FR for French, ar-AR for arabic etc.
  • Thank you! Problem solved.
  • what about English titles with Latin names and acronyms in them? On the "info" tab I have manually edited my citations to have proper capitalization. Output wipes that all away and transforms them all into "title case". How to get Zotero bibliography/output to just trust me (just leave capitalization alone, just use the exact text/capitalization that I have entered for every individual title)?
  • Put phrases within an English title that should be ignored by Title Casing in <span class=“no case”>Latin name</span> tags.
  • (We'd recommend keeping things in sentence case so as to work across citation styles, but to just leave capitalization alone all around you'd need to modify the style, specifically remove text-case="title" throughout).
  • Hi, where do I insert the tags around phrases to be ignored by title casing (also e.g. Roman numerals), as suggested by bwiernik? Not in the "Title" field directly, it seems.
  • Yes, in the title field directly.
  • Thanks, it does work - but only for enforcing lower case. Is there an analogous command to keep an all-caps word (such as a Roman numeral or an acronym) while switching cases?
  • Could you say what exactly you're trying/seeing?
    All caps should stay in all caps in all standard styles. Not sure what text-case="sentence" does, but you shouldn't be using that anyway.
  • I am switching cases via right-click on the title field in the desktop Zotero - I expect to be using the title case mainly, but since it's only possible to convert to title case and not the opposite way, I wanted to give sentence case a try.
    When I input a title like "Conrad III and the Second Crusade", the Roman numeral changes to "iii" (in sentence case) and then to "Iii" (in title case). Same with any acronym. This is not resolved by enveloping the numeral or acronym in the span class formula above.
  • ah yes, the built-in case conversion is much less sophisticated than what the citation processor is doing. The tags only apply to citation formatting and I'm not sure we're going to extend them to work with the right-click quick conversion (where you can, obviously, always fix per hand)
  • Fair enough - thanks for the answer!
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