Disable Sentence / Title case conversions

igreil
New user here. I imported an existing .bib file and, lo and behold, Zotero had converted all my titles to (I believe) “Sentence Case”. I have yet to find a way to disable that behavior: using {{double braces}} did nothing, e.g. (Going through hundreds of titles to correct them manually is not an option I consider.)

How can I tell Zotero to just leave my titles alone? It might work for English (I suppose: otherwise, why bother?), but it's a guaranteed embarrassment in languages like German, where the concept of title case does not exist (because we capitalize nouns always anyway, and not much else.)

Any help much appreciated.
  • bwiernik
    edited January 28, 2021
    Zotero/CSL and BibTeX have different conventions for storing titles. BibTeX expects titles to be stored in Title Case. It will lowercase letters as needed and expects letters that should always be uppercase (eg, proper nouns in English) to be escaped with brackets. This can produce much incorrect output unless all proper nouns are escaped.

    Zotero takes the opposite (in my view simpler) approach. Titles are expected in sentence case and will be converted to Title Case for styles that require it. Proper nouns are simply stored with an uppercase letter.

    In Zotero, case changes in styles only apply to English items, so you should label the item languages in the Language field (eg, de for German) to doable case changes for those items.

    I believe that if you indicate the language of the items in your .bib file, title case conversion will only apply to the English items.

    @emilianoeheyns have any tips here?
  • igreil
    edited January 28, 2021
    > It will lowercase letters as needed …

    Which is exactly the problem I am facing. That said, bracketing uppercase letters individually (!) did the trick, so thanks for that (and all it took was a RegEx search & replace in my favorite editor.) When exporting from Citavi, there is an option to “Place capital letters in braces”, but it does so for the whole title, and Zotero does not respect that.

    Works:

    @article{Deutschmann.2016,
    title = {{M}ountainbiken im {W}ald},
    author = {Deutschmann, Mario},
    date = {2016},
    journaltitle = {ZVR},
    number = {225}
    }

    Doesn't work (but probably should):

    @article{Deutschmann.2016,
    title = {{Mountainbiken im Wald}},
    author = {Deutschmann, Mario},
    date = {2016},
    journaltitle = {ZVR},
    number = {225}
    }

    > In Zotero, case changes in styles only apply to English items

    Unfortunately it also treats undeclared entries as “English”, without giving the option to set a different default language.

    That said, I’m good. Thanks.
  • bwiernik
    edited January 28, 2021
    It will treat undeclared entries as the language of your bibliography in your document. But in general I recommend the habit of always declaring the language of your items in your library.
  • igreil
    What do you mean, “in my document?” Where can I set that language? Because as soon as I import a new entry Zotero will break the title by converting it to all lowercase.

    On a case by case basis it's annoying but not a deal breaker, as it would’ve been with the import of my existing data. Using {} is an acceptable workaround, though.
  • emilianoeheyns
    I believe that if you indicate the language of the items in your .bib file, title case conversion will only apply to the English items.
    this is the case for BBT. There is a good reason for this, but the reason may be counter intuitive at first. BBT will not sentence case on import for non-english entries, and will not title-case for non-english entries on export, but you must have marked these entries with a language marker -- if no language is specified, english is assumed.
    there is an option to “Place capital letters in braces”, but it does so for the whole title, and Zotero does not respect that.
    https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/support/faq/#why-the-double-braces:

    To make matters even more complex, so many people have in the past wrongly recommended to “just wrap everything in one extra set of braces” that biblatex now ignores exactly that pattern (see here and here).

    That said, the BBT parser can optionally honor the outer braces (which are a terrible idea, and there are exceedingly few reasons it should ever be used), I just haven't exposed it as a preference.

    The sample entries above do not have a language field set, so would be treated as english.
  • bwiernik
    I was referring to if you were using Zotero’s word processor plugin. Sorry, wasn’t thinking that you are obviously writing in LaTeX.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Oh man, you're probably right. So part of my comment explains why the import is as it is, and the parts about export are probably irrelevant to the current question.
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