Bibliography problems - Chicago Manual of Style

I am having a couple problems with bibliography style for Chicago Manual of Style.

First, Zotero alphabetizes "Van Gelder" under "G" instead of "V." It should be under V.

Second, it is capitalizing some prepositions like "Before" and "After" in Word, even though I have them lower case in Zotero itself.

Third, when there are more than one author, Zotero uses ----- rather than _____ like it should.

Thanks!
  • Oh, and one more thing. Articles (a, an, the) should not influence alphabetization as well, but it currently does.
  • 1. I'll fix
    2. fbennett needs to look at, but I can confirm "before" and "after" being incorrectly capitalized.
    3. you're incorrect - Zotero should and does print 3 em-dashes (and certainly shouldn't print underscores) - how that is displayed depends on the font you're using.
    4. We're aware of, but it's basically impossible to handle as soon as we think beyond English titles.
  • "through" also is problematic

    Thanks!
  • Also "into."

    Sorry, just editing my dissertation bibliography! :)
  • On #3, has there been any thought of using the new three-em dash character introduced for this purpose (i.e. U+2E3B)? It's a bit early for it at the moment due to the lack of font support, but it would be nice to have at some point in the future.
  • I think we'll err on the side of being conservative on this - right now as far as I can tell this isn't implemented in any common font (at least on my system it's not) and even if it becomes more common, I don't see why we'd want to break this for people using incomplete or older fonts - especially since the difference isn't visible for many _and_ can be easily fixed on the publisher side for professionally typeset documents. So I'd say until we see the character implemented almost universally I don't think we'll put it into a CSL style.
  • I've added those words to the skip list coded in the processor (except for "into", which was already in there). You can test it by installing the processor patch plugin. (All it does is swap in the latest version of the citation processor. You can remove it after the next Zotero release.)

    (The last time I looked at this, I found that title-casing conventions vary for some of the prepositions. If down the road we start getting complaints running the other way, it will be time to think about making this configurable.)
  • Currently I think the unofficial policy is to follow CMoS on such questions. We might want to include that in the specs.
  • Fixed number 1
    The style is now fixed. The updated version will appear on the repository within 30mins (check the timestamp). Update your copy of the style by re-installing it from the repository. (See here if you need instructions for installing styles in standalone.)

    Styles should also update automatically within 24hs for Zotero 4.0+

    Any further problems please let us know.

    This should mean that everything in this thread except no. 4 (which we won't fix) has been fixed. Thanks for reporting.
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