Quote marks

Messensi
I would like to know how I coudl put a single quote mark in a title and prevent Zotero to change its form when quote in word.
I explain better: in transcriptions from Arabic, we need both opening and closing single quote mark for two different letters, and when I have a title with a closing simple quote mark followed by a single opening close mark, they are changed in my reference in Word. Is there a way to avoid that? How can I force the program to insert the quote mark I want?
Thank you in advance.
  • adamsmith
    Frank would have to say - since those are also used for Japanese transliterations, I assume he has thought about that.
  • Messensi
    Thank you. May I ask whether Frank found some time for this question. I am sorry to ask this, but my problem is becoming a bit urgent now.
    Is there an "escape sign" to avoid this?
    Or is there a way to write the unicode reference (like a \u{XXX} or somehting like this)?
  • fbennett
    Sorry for the delay. The CSL processor leaves proper quotes intact, regardless of their position (that is, both ‘quotes’ and ’backwards-quotes‘ are passed through as written). You should be able to check it in the CSL Edit pane from Zotero Preferences under the Advanced tab. (If you are able to confirm that, and if literal single quotes are being reversed in Word, then the problem lies in Word.)
  • Messensi
    Thank you very much, and sorry for the urge.
    I have tried, and I have two different behaviors of Zotero. I used this title:
    Tadbīr al-iksīr al-a‘ẓam / L'élaboration de l'élixir suprême...

    In the edit/preview pane, it works as you say when the 'general.useragent.locale' is set on fr-FR. I have then:
    Tadbīr al-iksīr al-a‘ẓam / L’élaboration de l’élixir suprême

    But when the option is set to en-US (EVEN with fr as the language of the book), it does not work, and I have (in every style):
    Tadbīr al-iksīr al-a“ẓam / L”élaboration de l’élixir suprême...
    For my urgent problem, I will use the French option (so you solved my problem, thank you), but maybe there is a bug here.
  • fbennett
    Ah, there we go. I can reproduce that here. Whether a single quote is a proper quote or an integral part of a word can't easily be determined automatically, so I think you'll need to supply a hint. If you put a backslash before the quote in al-a‘ẓam, it will parse correctly.
  • fbennett
    (Well, not quite. It then places a space before the quote, which is not good. I'm kind of swamped at the moment, so your workaround seems to be the way to go for the present. I'll try to get this fixed when I have time, though.)
  • fbennett
    A further update. The processor has trouble interpreting the straight quotes used as apostrophes in L'élaboration and l'élixir. If you set these as proper right-quote characters (which you probably should do anyway) and place a backslash before the open quote in al-a‘ẓam, it will render correctly in en-US.
  • Messensi
    Thank you very much for your help and your time.
    Indeed, the backslash and the opening quote for the apostrophes fixes the problem in English. However, I have tried to render it with the locale fr-FR, and then, the backslash appears. So, you fixed my bug, I will know how to do it for what I need now. But maybe there is a problem here (for future versions) as the rendering differs in en-US and fr-FR.
  • fbennett
    That's certainly not good. It will be some time before I can dig into this, but I'll put it on the TODO list, and try to get it fixed during the New Year holidays.

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