Hi

Thanks for your help, but I might need a bit more to get this cleared up, as I am a newbie.

I've installed the processor, both in Firefox, and standalone. Restarted everything. Sort order is still incorrect.. What do you mean with Swedish locale? I can't find any locale setting in Zotero? When you say it's per style, do you mean citation style? I'm using Harvard or APA 6, but not sure how those would be modified to accomodate non-english characters.


Using Zotero 4.0.21.2

With kindest regards, John

(Sorry, v. late here, will write tomorrow, if others don't pick up the issue. It's to do with a sort function in JavaScript; it may be difficult to get Swedish sort conventions in the English locale.)

Sorting is controlled by a function described here. As the text under the link shows, it is capable of delivering a correct sort of Swedish characters, but only if Swedish is set as locale for all comparisons.

So the first question is whether Swedish characters should always be sorted using Swedish conventions, regardless of the language in which the bibliography is presented. There would be a case, at least, for applying English sorting conventions in an English document, since many readers may not be aware of the Swedish rules. Is this a firm requirement?

If Swedish sort conventions are a priority, there are a couple of ways to get to that result. One would be to always discriminate accented characters, for all locales. That's obviously out, since Swedish is an outlier: most other languages would start throwing incorrect results.

An alternative would be to always set Swedish as a fallback to the default locale (the language in which the bibliography is presented). As I understand the spec under the link above, that should work. It would mean, though, that in an English document, characters that occur in Swedish would always sort using Swedish conventions, even where they also occur in other languages that adopt different sorting conventions. So there would be some sorts that come out wrong.

The only other way to get there would be to provide a setting for the sort locale, and expose that in the Zotero UI. As it's a very specialized requirement, and would be a workaround in any case, that is unlikely to materialize.

All of that said, the current processor code would clobber Swedish sort rules, even in a Swedish document (where is says 'sensitivity: "base"). I'll fix that, but it won't address this use case, unfortunately.

For what it's worth, and as far as I can tell, the Chicago Manual of Style does not provide any guidance on cross-language sorting. I think that would imply an assumption for CMS, at least, that English conventions (e.g. A = Ä) should be applied across the board.

Having said this, @J.Koukoutsas what style are you using? If you're using a style that supports multiple locales, setting extensions.zotero.export.bibliographyLocale to "sv-SE" should have produced correct sorting (but it would have also changed some words in the bibliography to Swedish if the translation exists).

This works correctly for me, _but_ you do have to switch to a different style and back for the locale to take effect. @fbennett, can we fix this? Is this in citeproc-js or in Zotero?

Edit: this is with APA 6th edition. Harvard (I assume the "Elsevier Harvard" that comes pre-installed with Zotero) does not support multiple locales, en-US only.

you can get Swedish sort order in an English bibliography by preparing a custom style.

Do you mean by specifying the default bibliography language? Wouldn't you have to override all the translations? Or is there a trick I am missing?

(Since the default-locale setting and the overwrites of the locale terms etc. need to be coordinated, the "fix" would code both of those into the style CSL, bypassing the Zotero preference for the former.)

@J.Koukoutsas: Happy to prepare that style version for you, if required.