Capitalisation sync issues

Anska
I have to have all my ref titles in sentence case, e.g. "The assessment of mindfulness with self-report measures: Existing scales and open issues."

Originally, the reference was imported to my desktop Zotero as follows "The Assessment of Mindfulness with Self-Report Measures: Existing Scales and Open Issues."

I changed it in Zotero (on my desktop) using the Transform Text facility to "The assessment of mindfulness with self-report measures: Existing scales and open issues."

But it comes up in my Word doc (Mac) as "The Assessment of Mindfulness with Self-Report Measures: Existing scales and open issues."

In Zotero online, just like Zotero desktop, I see "The assessment of mindfulness with self-report measures: Existing scales and open issues."

No matter how many times I click 'refresh' in the Word doc, it won't change and stays with the mix of upper and lower cases.

I've tried a new document - still the same.
I've tried rewriting the title. It comes up the same.
I've tried copying and pasting. It comes up the same.

On Zotero desktop, I've tried just taking out the capital letters "The ssessment of indfulness with elf-eport easures: Existing scales and open issues."
It changes in Zotero online.
It changes my Word doc perfectly.

But when I put the first letters back again - in lower case - to Zotero desktop (and it duplicates perfectly in Zotero online), it damn well rewrites the Word doc with them in upper case.

I've tried rewriting them in my Word doc but when I refresh, it brings back the error capitalisations!!

I'm frankly baffled!! Sadly I have to do this for about 12 items so Zotero is being REALLY USELESS at the moment.

PLEASE can anyone help!???

Thanks
Annie


  • Anska
    Okay, I've got a solution to this (so I'm leaving this here in case someone else has this problem).

    Zotero seems to prioritise Short Title over Title.

    As well as a main Title for the citation, if you look further down the Info panel, there is also a Short Title (Under DOI and ISSN). Because I'd imported the citation from the internet, the automatic citation system had put a shortened title here with the wrong capitalisation.

    If you (like me) are also having problems with capitalisation syncing, I bet you'll find the part of your title that's wrong written wrongly in Short Title. Either delete or edit as you would the main title and it fixes the issue.

    Phew! I was going mad!
  • adamsmith
    @dstillman @fbennett I can reproduce this: In APA style, when the short title is in title case but the full title is sentence cased, the printed title gets rendered in title case. This is presumably a side effect of implementing the old propachi code in Zotero, but this is obviously not good. It's very impressive that Anska was able to figure this out. Most users won't.
  • fbennett
    I can look into this if someone can provide a test item. To submit an item, join the Jurism Test Submission group, sync, create a collection "apa," drop the item into it, and sync.
  • dstillman
    edited July 14, 2019
    It looks like it's as simple as creating a Book item with "This is a title: but this is a subtitle" in the Title field and "This is a Title" in the Short Title field. Then, with APA, I get This is a Title: But this is a subtitle. (n.d.)..

    If I change the subtitle to "This is a title", I get This is a title: But this is a subtitle. (n.d.). as expected.

    If the Short Title serves mainly to facilitate a prefix match in citeproc-js, then doing a case-insensitive comparison probably makes sense.
  • fbennett
    edited July 20, 2019
    I can fix capitalization in the full title, but there are issues around the title-short field. The main/sub split no longer relies on a match with the short form. Code could be added to specially do a text-insensitive comparison of the parsed main title with title-short, and overwrite the latter if the two happen to match; but it would miss some cases, and that might cause further confusion. Open to suggestions.

    @dstillman, @adamsmith
  • dstillman
    @fbennett: I'm not following. What's the current logic here?
  • fbennett
    edited July 20, 2019
    I misspoke (obviously). Let me back up.

    A main/sub split can occur without a match between title-short and the leading portion of title. In that case, title-short and title are unrelated, capitalization is handled independently, the bug doesn't manifest, and there is nothing to worry about.

    In this case, there is a match, obviously, and that's what is triggering the bug. The match code is in there to support hinting for subtitles ending in ? or !. It's kicking in whenever a match is found, but if it's working correctly, that should be harmless.

    There is still a question, but it is much simpler than what I wrote above: When title-short matches the main title case-insensitive, should it be overwritten with the (possibly differently cased) value of the main title?

    (Sorry for the confusion.)
  • dstillman
    When title-short matches the main title case-insensitive, should it be overwritten with the (possibly differently cased) value of the main title?
    Yes. I don't think we can expect people to edit the Short Title field every time they edit the Title, and we should assume the Title has the preferred casing.
  • adamsmith
    Ah, so what you're asking is for something like
    title: I like marmite: No, really I do
    short title: I Like Marmite

    what the output of <text variable="title-short"/> should be, correct? It's a tricky question. I'd be inclined to say leave the short title alone, i.e. render "I Like Marmite". As you suggest, there's some concern the logic will just get confusing for users. Don't feel strongly about this, though. Definitely see the case for adjusting it.

    That said, @dstillman, I think we should (and probably should have a while ago) automatically apply a right-click --> sentence case operation on title to short title
  • dstillman
    I think we should (and probably should have a while ago) automatically apply a right-click --> sentence case operation on title to short title
    Yeah, I was thinking the same. I've done that in the latest beta. It only does it when there's a case-insensitive prefix match.

    (I've also gotten rid of the extra "Transform Text" submenu and put the options directly in the context menu.)
  • fbennett
    edited July 20, 2019
    Some way of aligning the two in Zotero data would be good. It would mean that proper nouns need adjustment in two locations when the title is forced to sentence case, which might lead to complaints though. Tough one.

    I guess for the immediate fix, we can force case alignment in the processor and see how it goes. It's probably safe to assume that if title casing is wanted just on the short form for some reason, the style will impose it. I'll include a processor option to turn off forced alignment just in case issues arise ...

    The revised processor is available at tag 1.2.18. The behavior can be disabled by instantiating the processor with sys.force_short_title_casing_alignment = false (default is true).
  • dstillman
    Great, thanks — that's available now in the latest Zotero beta.
  • bwiernik
    Yeah, the only examples I can think of where casing would be expected to be different are for things like abbreviations of classics titles, which wouldn’t have matching anyway.
  • JennK
    I've had a similar issue. I change the title to sentence case in the Zotero client, but then in the Word document bibliography list, the title has not been completely corrected regarding capital letters. I noticed what appears to be a pattern - if there is a colon (:) in the title, then the first part of the title is not properly adjusted to reflect the case change (in other words, capitalized words remain capitalized before the colon). However, the latter part of the title (after the colon) appears to be fine. Perhaps the colon in the title is causing a problem?
  • fbennett
    Do those items have a value in the short title field, or is it empty?
  • dstillman
    @JennK: It doesn't sound like you have a similar issue — it sounds like you have the exact same issue, which, as we say above, should be fixed in the latest Zotero beta. Are you using that?
  • fbennett
    @dstillman, @adamsmith, @bwiernik

    One further thought, about the flip-side of the topic of this thread. Since we now have pretty-good parsing of main/sub titles where title-short is empty, we could set its value implicitly in the processor in that case. That may be too much implicit magic for comfort, but I'll just mention that the possibility is there.
  • bwiernik
    Personally, I think it would be really great to implicitly set title-short when empty.
  • fbennett
    edited July 21, 2019
    Implicit subtitles are available in citeproc-js 1.2.20. The feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled by setting an option on the "sys" object before instantiating the processor:

    sys.implicit_short_title = true;

    (I'll enable the feature in the next Jurism release [current is 71m2] so it can be test-driven there.)
  • JennK
    @fbennett, yes, there is a value in the short title field. When I clear that, the citation updates properly in the bibliography.
    @dstillman, I am using version 5.0.71. I'm not sure if that is the beta version; if not, I will install the beta version.
Sign In or Register to comment.