New (?) MLA error

Samuel Steinberg
I haven't used MLA in a bit, I have found a couple of errors introduced since I used it last.

1. Journal: Extra space between year and semicolon:

Ramírez-Pimienta, J. C. “Picaresca mexicana:‘ El Periquillo Sarniento’ en el tejido mental de la nación.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 51.2 (1998) : 225–235. Print.

Should be: Ramírez-Pimienta, J. C. “Picaresca mexicana:‘ El Periquillo Sarniento’ en el tejido mental de la nación.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 51.2 (1998): 225–235. Print.

2. Capitalization: It looks like something fancy was added--titles no longer are rendered as entered. In English, it seems that the correct exceptions have been set up, but Spanish and German titles I've entered come out differently in the bib than the way I entered them (all words capitalized, for example, in Spanish, when generally only the first word and proper names are capitalized).
  • fbennett
    This may be a processor issue. Can you post an example of a mis-capitalized title from German or Spanish?
  • samuelas
    Sure thing:

    Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1997. Print.

    ---. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen Aus Dem Beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951. Print.

    I've also noticed that this affects journal titles as well: "PMLA" (the way I entered it) is rendered as "Pmla."
  • adamsmith
    edited May 24, 2011
    Thank - I'll look into 1.
    2. Is exactly what you say it is - titles are automatically title-cased in English (as per MLA requirements) but that's not working correctly in other languages: Frank, any idea on how to deal with that both short and medium term?

    Edit: Oh my - I can't believe I actually wrote the macro causing 1 - this is so convoluted it'll take me a little time to figure out, but I can roughly see why it happens. I think the new csl processor might be slightly less generous with the garbage input it's getting there, leading to the extra space...
  • fbennett
    @samuelas: While we have you, could you also post the text of the German title as you entered it? I'll need that for testing.
  • samuelas
    Sure: Title should be:

    Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben
  • ajlyon
    On (2), chalk another one up to language-sensitive handling of citations...
  • fbennett
    edited May 25, 2011
    Yep. This will need to be done in the processor, although it can be addressed without specific support in CSL itself. Maybe a threshold question is whether the casing of words ever varies in these two languages -- do Spanish and German have a concept of "sentence case" versus "title case"?
  • fbennett
    @samuelas,

    The most certain way to avoid extraneous spaces is to be strict about never starting a prefix or ending a suffix with a space, and placing all joining spaces in delimiter attributes instead. In a style coded in that way, extraneous spaces can never arise.
  • adamsmith
    Frank -
    at least in German, no, there is no such thing as title case.

    And I figure your last comment is for me not for samuelas - s/he didn't code nor change the style. I'm of course aware of this, but did this one a while ago. Also I think this isn't actually due to spaces in affixes, but to a super-messy combination of delimiters.
  • fbennett
    @adamsmith: I mistook the authorship in my haste, sorry.
  • adamsmith
    A major update of MLA has just been uploaded to the repo - it fixes issue 1 (and includes correct citations for many more media types).
    Capitalization is more complicated - when I get a chance I'll post a workaround for the period until this is fixed which will allow people to modify the style so that it doesn't alter capitalization from the title field(s).
    (short form: remove all instance of text-case="title"
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step )
  • adamsmith
    Note that this will be - kind of - fixed in the next version of Zotero. Read the description of the fix here: https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1834
    this means you'll have to use the language field of non-English items.
  • fbennett
    We could set up to presume non-English field content in styles that have default-locale set to a non-English value. I'm holding a processor release until mid-week, if anyone has views on that, let me know.
  • adamsmith
    I don't think that'll be necessary - I very much doubt that any of those styles use title case in the first place (though - clearly - I'm to lazy to check).
  • fbennett
    That's a good point. I may build it in anyway, though. Language-tagged entries will process correctly on both sides of the divide in any case, so it shouldn't do any harm.
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