Capitalizing first particle in note style.

birne75
Hello,

short question:
is there a way to capitalize the first particle in a footnote in note styles automatically?

Couldn't find anything on the forum.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Daniel
  • adamsmith
    Could you give an example? Not sure I follow what you're trying to do
  • birne75
    Ok, for example, I have an item by an author al-Mizzī - an Arab author from the middle ages. I set the style up to tread the article al- as a particle (demote-non-dropping-particle="sort-only").
    This works fine, the article is not regarded for sorting etc, but is also present.
    So when I add a citation, it places it in the footnote.
    But it appears as "al-Mizzī", not as "Al-Mizzī", even though its at the beginning of the note.
    The same happends of course, when I add a citation inside a normal footnote and the citation starts a new sentence.
  • birne75
    Just to ask again here - I may have phrased it in a weird way, but basically what I mean is this:

    Is there a way to ensure that the first character of a citation at the beginning of a footnote is always uppercase?

    https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#citation

    "A note to CSL processor developers In note styles, a citation is often a sentence by itself. Therefore, the first character of a citation should preferably be uppercased when there is no preceding text in the note. In all other cases (e.g. when a citation is inserted into the middle of a pre-existing footnote), the citation should be printed as is."

    I would be cool, if there was a way to do this.
    Thanks in advance!

    Best,
    Daniel
  • adamsmith
    Sorry for not responding. I don't think that's possible, no. It's also a bit tricky to apply to author names in particular. E.g. bell hooks should never be capitalized, and I don't see how we can reasonably mark the distinction in a reliable way.

    It is possible to add <name-part name="family" text-case="sentence"/> to adjust the author last name, but the problem then becomes that I don't think it lowercases when you add a prefix. It also would apply to second and third authors, for whom you wouldn't want it.
  • birne75
    Thanks for the reply!
    Yes, I can see how this could be tricky and I agree adding <name-part name="family" text-case="sentence"/> will bring other problems with it.
    I will just have to remember to look of the footnotes and capitalize those case before typesetting everything for print.

    Best wishes,
    Daniel
  • dstark
    @adamsmith, since Zotero already "knows" about (non-)dropping particles, would it be possible to consider

    1) adding support for capitalizing these particles similarly to what's already in place for capitalizing (or not) "ibid." and then
    2) using <span class="nocase"> and </span> in the creator fields of particular Zotero records to bypass automatic capitalization on an ad hoc basis for cases like bell hooks?
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