Issue: Capital loss after bibtex bib file import [SOLVED]

bwakkie
edited October 29, 2022
I have an issue that after importing my bib file some Capitals are lost.

After importing ...
@Article{Wachkoo2019,
author = {Wachkoo, A. A. and {van Steenis}, J. and Rather, Z. A. and Sengupta, J. and Banerjee, D.},
year = {2019},
journal = {{Turkish Journal of Zoology}},
title = {{First record of the genus {\textit{Spilomyia}} (Diptera: Syrphidae) from the Oriental Region}},
pages = {239--242},
volume = {43},
}

... the title in changed to:
First record of the genus spilomyia (diptera: Syrphidae) from the oriental region

Hench the Capitals dissapeared!

How do I prepare my bib file to keep the Capitals in place? I've put the whole title between double braces {{}} with the thought to keep them.

thanks,
Bastiaan
  • dstillman
    Are you using Better BibTeX? With stock Zotero, this is the imported Title field:

    First record of the genus <i>Spilomyia</i> (Diptera: Syrphidae) from the Oriental Region
  • bwakkie
    Ah yes, I use Better BibTeX, I'll try without it and report back.
  • bwiernik
    BetterBibTeX is doing this correctly though. If there are uppercase letters you want persevered in TeX, the words need to be wrapped in {} brackets.
  • bwakkie
    I had my whole sentence between braces...
    {{My Capital Sentence with {\textit{Some}} other stuff}}
    ... and BetterBibTeX did not handle this well, see my first example.

    I can confirm though that by disabling the BetterBibTeX add-on the conversion worked weirdly enough:
    "First record of the genus Spilomyia (Diptera: Syrphidae) from the Oriental Region"

    Maybe BetterBibTeX expects the title be be in the following form? ...
    {{M}y {C}apital {S}entence with {\textit{{S}ome} other stuff}
    ... but I didnt't test this as I needed to move on with my project.

    I use Zotero 6.0.15 with BetterBibTeX add-on version 6.7.35 (but disabled for the conversion)

    Cheers and thanks @dstillman for the pointer to BetterBibTeX which helped solve my sollution.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited October 30, 2022
    https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/support/faq/:

    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).

    If you use a triple outer brace, you'll get the behavior you want. For imports, BBT tries to import bib files preserving intent, such that if you rendered it with biblatex, and you rendered the post-import items with Zotero, you'd get the same output.
  • bwakkie
    OK I guess to keep my bib file sane one should try to use braces around individual single characters where needed. Thanks.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited October 30, 2022
    Recommendation is actually to brace words, not single letters, since bracing single letters might mess with kerning.
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