There is a ticket to deal with these kinds of issues but it is fairly complicated. See https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/832 For the time being you will need to manually alter them after the bibliography is generated.

kind of - APA style will just print whatever is in Zotero - for that reason it's a good idea to save titles in sentence case, i.e. with only the first letter and proper nouns capitalized (that will often mean changing them after automatic import).
Styles that require title-case (i.e. all words except for articles and prepositions capitalized) can do that automatically. Because of proper nouns that's not possible the other way around.

Sorry, one other question: would it be better (i.e., more flexible) to leave the first word after a colon capitalized, or to put that lowercase as well?

Thank you!

APA 6th: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/08/
"Capital letter also for subtitle"

CMoS, 8.162 Subtitle capitalization:
"A subtitle, whether in sentence-style or headline-style capitalization, always begins with a capital letter."

I'd also love to see a feature to help make converting title-case journal article titles to sentence case easier. (I use APA 6th). Many downloaded citations have article titles in title case, and manually editing them is quite a pain. I do use http://www.convertcase.net/ sometimes to make it quicker, but it's still a laborious process.

If I remember rightly Endnote does have an option to automatically output titles as sentence case regardless of input, but obviously this is a bit dodgy given the possibility of proper nouns in the title etc.

I'm not sure what specifically to suggest, though - would be interested to hear others' ideas, or possible workarounds that are quicker than manual editing of entries.

It would be awesome if someone would just change the lowercase option to leave the first letter of the title capitalized. I don't think there is any situation where the entire title would be required in lowercase, so everyone has to go back and switch the first letter to capital again.

If it could go a step further and not lowercase any letter immediately following a colon or question mark as well (since they typically mark the transition from title to subtitle), that would also be a massive time saver.

This is probably asking a lot, but: would it be possible, if you guys are eventually going to add automatic case handling as a citation-style feature, to also add an option to mark up titles for what language they are in? Titlecasing is essentially done only in English (afaik). If you have a bibliography with mixed entries in multiple languages, non-English titles should never be affected by titlecasing. (And the word processor might like to have the language markup anyway, for other things such as spellchecking).

Thanks for the info Adam, very useful.

f you set the hidden Preferences CapitalizeTitles to false
http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs
you'll get sentence case import from some sites - though you'll also get some in all caps

Interesting - I actually get sentence case imports reasonably often already. The import seems to come through with whatever capitalisation the site I'm accessing it from is using for the article, even though I've checked and have got CapitalizeTitles set to True.

There is a function in the translator toolkit that is used to capitalize titles -- it is used rather sparingly in actual translators, and the preference controls only the behavior of that function.

Furthermore, translator authors can override the preference setting.

For me MLA and MLA with URL styles are not Title Case-ing titles - it seems they are just outputting the title in whatever case it is in.

I understand from adamsmith (see below), that Title Case-ing is working in some styles calling for it, but not all. MLA seems to be one where it is not working.

(But, as I have mentioned before, Zotero is great. I use it extensively and introduce it to my students. This would make it better.)

from adamsmith:
Zotero can in fact change title capitalization in styles. This works almost perfectly from sentence case to title case, but has lots of problems in the other direction (and there is no viable solution for that - no way Zotero can distinguish proper nouns). The solution is to save all of your items with sentence case and then have them converted to title case by the respective style (this might not be implemented in all styles requiring title case - let us know when you find an instance where it's missing).
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15636/changes-to-fields-and-item-types-for-zotero-21/#Comment_79745

adamsmith, thank you! installed the dev updates you did and the Title Casing appears to be working fine. -John

to adamsmith - Back on Jan 19 2011 (see above) you fixed title-casing on MLA. Recently I needed to do a couple MLA bibliographies and found that while the MLA with URL is title-casing, the MLA is not now title-casing. This even shows up differently when you mouse over the regular and with URL MLA styles on http://www.zotero.org/styles/

I do know it was working end of Jan. Could you possibly fix this again? Thanks.

Thanks for this fascinating conversation. I'm heading up a set of shared bibliographies in a higher education setting, and we want to establish certain rules that will make these biblios work for a number of output styles; do accomplish this, it sounds like we will title everything sentence (down) style, as titles can apparently be automatically set to headline (up) style in a given output style if needed.

This seems quite significant with the most recent Chicago style (16th), which as I've just learned recommends that *all* titles be headline style, a big departure from several editions ago; see 16th edition section 15.13, Titles in reference list entries, which links to 8.155, Capitalization of titles of works—general principles. See also their examples at www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html, all of which use headline-style capitalization in either notes-biblio or author-date formats.

The current Zotero output styles for Chicago (including those shipped as default Zotero styles or in the style repository) don't seem to reflect the above, however. I manually edited the .csl file, and it was easy to insert text-case="title" for all instances of the title, container-title, and collection-title variables, so assuming my students use only Chicago notes-biblio or author-date I suppose we are set! (The comment above re. Zotero 3.0 checking for language prior to title-casing is well taken.) But I do worry a bit about promoting among students: are there other major output styles in use in the US that rely so heavily on headline-style capitalization?

Many thanks,

Jim

yes - APA uses sentence case for titles, but we should probably title-case container titles.
edit: I'll also double check that we're doing this right in all CMoS styles.

And yes, your conclusion is exactly right - promote entering items in sentence case among students and they'll be fine in 99% of all cases.

OK - title case is back for MLA and included in all versions of CMoS.
I didn't change anything for APA: Book titles (even where they are containers) are sentence case in APA as well. Journal titles are title cased, but they really should be saved in title case since they are proper names - using the title case option could create all types of issues for journals with foreign names that I'd like to avoid.