Expanding text transform function

iscott
I'm really enjoying Zotero and appreciate the automatic text-transform being available with a simple right-click on the field. I find, though, that this feature only works on the Title field. Often I want to change capitalization on the Series field as well. Is it possible to implement the feature on other fields? Or am I doing something wrong?
  • scot
    You're not doing anything wrong. Transforms only work for Title and Publication fields as far as I can tell, but could usefully be added for Series Titles. And it would be useful to have something similar for personal names and publishers, to clean up data from databases which are in ALL CAPS.

    iscot
  • arodrigues
    I am sooo happy with this transform text tool! Here I was, manually changing cases, when I thought "wouldn't it be nice if one could simply right click in here and change the text to lower case" and there it was! I am very impressed!

    Subscribe to the suggestion that it would be nice to have it in other fields as well, particularly for authors' names (as in a small but annoying percentage of imports they come in upper case).

    My additional suggestion is that to have a third option "Sentence case" where only the first word is capitalised. This would be the option I would use the most (currently I transform to lower case and then capitalise the first word manually).
  • zroutik
    I agree very much with the "Sentence case". Cheers, M
  • adamsmith
    As a note: Zotero can apply sentence case through styles - so even if your title is in lowercase or titlecase you can still generate output in sentence case if the style calls for it.
  • zroutik
    Dear Adam,

    you cheered me up quite well. That would be an answer for eth. Capitalise when needed -- not important in the Library, but we have an extra "feature" (possibility) -- to say whether the first letter is needed to be capitalised (names,...) or not necessarily.

    Unfortunately, tried a couple of styles, randomly (but remember Oxford, Nature, Science, Elsevier, APA, ASA), and none of them capitalises the first letter. I'm sure some of them should be -- there is a capital after a dot. I believe this option is available, it was just not implemented into the styles.

    Cheers, M
  • adamsmith
    yeah, it's not implemented.
    the operator in csl is
    text-case="sentence"
    In APA, for example,
    This

    <macro name="title">
    <choose>
    <if type="book thesis" match="any">
    <text variable="title" font-style="italic"/>
    </if>
    <else>
    <text variable="title" text-case="sentence"/>
    </else>
    </choose>
    </macro>

    would have to become this

    <macro name="title">
    <choose>
    <if type="book thesis" match="any">
    <text variable="title" font-style="italic" text-case="sentence"/>
    </if>
    <else>
    <text variable="title" text-case="sentence"/>
    </else>
    </choose>
    </macro>


    See here for instructions on implementing simple edits yourself:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
  • zroutik
    edited September 14, 2009
    I simply vote that the styles have to be corrected regarding this issue, globally. Then the 'lower case' and 'UPPER CASE' makes perfect sense. Cheers, M
  • adamsmith
    it's not so simple. Problem is this: If as style calls for sentence case, but you have proper names in the title, Zotero is going to do this wrong (i.e. you're going to have "The european miracle" rather than "The European miracle".
    So imposing sentence case is problematic.
  • zroutik
    eh! what about preserving the minority UPPER CASing?! (majority UPPER CASing would be translated as you suggested.) Nevermind, I'm not the only one who was thinking about this ever before... Cheers, M
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