Zotero capitalises pH to PH in titles

Padryk
If I use the citation style preview on publications with pH in the title then the capitalisation is automatically converted to PH. This occurs when I create the bibliography using the American Chemical Society citation style, when I select "Style Preview" in the preferences menu and I guess unsurprisingly also when I try and use it via the word plugin. I am getting round this atm using <span class="nocase"> pH </span> but maybe this is something which could be included?

Here is an example bibliography using the "Create bibliography feature" to illustrate the problem
Yin, Jun, Ying Hu, and Juyoung Yoon. “Fluorescent Probes and Bioimaging: Alkali Metals, Alkaline Earth Metals and PH.” Chem. Soc. Rev. 44, no. 14 (2015): 4619–44. https://doi.org/10.1039/C4CS00275J.
  • bwiernik
    The “span” syntax is the way to avoid title casing individual words. Adding individual words to a blacklist is likely to lead to unexpected false positives and is fairly opaque to users, so I don’t think such a thing would be implemented.

    (@dstillman @adamsmith Given that Zotero/citeproc-js don’t [and shouldn’t] support complete HTML markup in fields, I’ve wondered whether replacing the more verbose tags for smallcaps and nocase with shorter tags, like <nocase>, would be a better user experience.)
  • Padryk
    Thanks for the quick reply, that makes sense. Would it be possible to make the blacklist accessible in the user's own copy of Zotero? Or is it even something which I could already edit?
  • adamsmith
    I thought we did not titlecase words with lowercase-uppercase combination where lowercase is in first position?
    If we're not already doing that, that seems like it'd be a good idea that'd avoid pH and similar

    (no, the blacklist isn't currently accessible without compiling Zotero; not sure if that'd be good to allow)
  • MaiVuong
    Hello @Padryk,
    Could you show me where to put the line pH in the CSL style?
    I want to solve the same problem of PH and pH?
    Thanks a lot!

  • adamsmith
    <span class="nocase"> pH </span> just goes in the title field in Zotero, not in the CSL style. There's nothing in CSL you can currently do to address this.
  • Padryk
    Hey,
    The way I got around it was editing the title in my zotero library. So I changed the article title in the library from:
    Fluorescent Probes and Bioimaging: Alkali Metals, Alkaline Earth Metals and pH
    to:
    Fluorescent Probes and Bioimaging: Alkali Metals, Alkaline Earth Metals and <span class="nocase"> pH </span>
  • bwiernik
    Your use of span there is correct, but you should store the rest of the title in sentence case, rather than title case
  • MaiVuong
    Thanks a lot guys! I did not know that I can edit the field in Zotero like this :o
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