Would it be better to have all translators store items only in sentence case? Obviously, the citation style will convert to title case if a citation requires that.

I understand that. What about converting only dictionary words to sentence case, and leave out any word that is all caps or has numbers or not a dictionary word as-is?

Since that's still going to have problems, I think if we're going to do this, we should go for a clean, easy-to-follow solution. @Rintze @dstillman do you have any opinion on this.

I'm not a fan of automatic case conversion on import, since it's probably quite unreliable and because it makes it hard to distinguish items imported directly in sentence case (which most likely have correct casing) from items imported in title case but automatically converted to sentence case (which would need manual review). It also hides the real problem, which is that publishers shouldn't make item metadata available in title case.

By the way, maybe it would make sense to move the "Title Case" and "Sentence case" options out of the "Transform Text" right-click menu and bring them to the top level (and rename them to e.g. "Convert to Title Case" and "Convert to Sentence case"? That would make it easier to use them for manual corrections.

I definitely think titles imported in Title Case should be kept as is. As citation errors go, accidental title case is much less jarring than proper nouns or acronyms being lower case. Assuming there will always be a substantial user base who does no corrections, leaving title case is preferable.

For titles imported in all caps, I think converting to title case is probably okay. The only thing this breaks is acronyms, but I think those are probably uncommon enough to make fixing the very jarring all caps more preferable.

Yeah, that's what I thought

Rather than having Zotero do this automatically in import, or to all entries in an entire library, how about allowing the selection of multiple documents (as usual), and having a command that does the transform to all selected documents?

I have modified a javascript based on the code from others in another link, I forgot from whom, but big thanks!

zoteroPane = Zotero.getActiveZoteroPane();
items = zoteroPane.getSelectedItems();
var result = "";

for (item of items) {
var extra = item.getField('extra');

// Check if the title has not been processed before
if (extra.indexOf("sentenceCase:1") === -1) {
var title = item.getField('title').trim();

if (title) {
result += " " + title + "\n";

// Make first char uppercase and the remainder lowercase
var new_title = title[0].toUpperCase() + title.substring(1).toLowerCase();

// Capitalize the first letter after ':' or '?'
new_title = new_title.replace(/([:?])\s*(.)/g, function(match, p1, p2) {
return p1 + ' ' + p2.toUpperCase();
});

result += "-> " + new_title + "\n\n";

// Add marker in extra to stop title being overwritten by this code
var new_extra = extra + "\nsentenceCase:1";

// Uncommented this to write changes to title and extra fields
item.setField('title', new_title);
await item.saveTx();
item.setField('extra', new_extra);
await item.saveTx();
}
}
}

return result;


you need to ctrl A all the files you want, and then go to tools-developers-runjavasccript, then paste the code. This code has to keep the capital of the first letter after "?" or ":", but for other words that need to keep capital, like "SMEs" and such, please welcome others to expand the word list. This is code is modified base on OpenAI ChatGPT, it really works