suppresstitlecase

[wujastyk]

The advanced BBT setting suppressTitleCase is documented and there's even a link to it. But in the current BBT, that setting seems to have gone. Are we meant to add "title" "booktitle" to verbatimfields?

Task: I'm trying to import a large BibLaTeX file into Zotero. In the BibLaTeX file, I've paid a lot of hand-crafting to title cases and I don't want it all downcased.

[retorquere]

See the text under "Zotero" on the same page.

[wujastyk]

I'm sorry, I don't understand this answer. What are you pointing to? suppressTitleCase is mentioned here, but the link it points to does not contain documentation on that switch, and the suppressTitleCase option does not appear in the list of advanced preferences. That is why I was asking whether this feature has been withdrawn.

[retorquere]

The first link you posted was to https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/installation/preferences/hidden-preferences/#suppresstitlecase, the second to https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/support/faq/index.html. Look at the "Zotero" section of the first link to see how you can set these. But i maintain this is generally not a good idea.

[retorquere]

Oh sorry I was talking about verbatim. You almost certainly do not want to make title verbatim.

[retorquere]

The docs generation is broken -- the option has been renamed to exportTitleCase but it's not showing up in the docs. I'll look at that.

[retorquere]

Are we meant to add "title" "booktitle" to verbatimfields?

No, why would you want that?

[wujastyk]

when I import, all BibLaTeX titles are downcased.
Input:

@Article{irwi-1982,
  author       = {John C. Irwin},
  citationkey  = {irwi-1982},
  date         = {1982},
  journaltitle = {History of Religions},
  number       = {4},
  pages        = {339--360},
  title        = {The Sacred Anthill and the Cult of the Primordial Mound},
  volume       = {21},
  issn         = {00182710, 15456935},
  url          = {http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062329},
  urldate      = {2024-01-24},
  file         = {:Irwin, JC/1982 - The Sacred Anthill and the Cult of the Primordial Mound.pdf:PDF},
  publisher    = {University of Chicago Press},
}

After import:

[retorquere]

Yes, but that's sentence casing, not title casing. I'll look at what is needed when I'm back home, the title casing comment had me thinking about export.

[wujastyk]

I probably have the terminology wrong. But what I need is for the import procedure to leave the original BibTeX titles untouched.
And I think the current behaviour is new, because I have an BibLaTeX->Zotero bibliography that I imported in May last year, and all the capitalization in the titles is intact.

[retorquere]

[retorquere]

this behavior is not new -- it's almost as old as BBT. Verbatim does something that will often have a similar effect but only if you do not use any LaTeX commands in any of the titles. In your case, you just want the sentence-case option set to "no". You do not want verbatim import.

[retorquere]

title = {The Sacred Anthill and the Cult of the Primordial Mound},

I'm not getting in your way when you want to change this, the setting I showed above will do what you want, but

The sacred anthill and the cult of the primordial mound

is the correct result after import. Zotero stores titles in sentence-case, and all CSL styles it uses expect it that way. If you have the entry in Zotero as

The Sacred Anthill and the Cult of the Primordial Mound

you will get the wrong results with sentence-case styles like APA7. You may have needs that make it so you never have to use Zotero for bibliography creation, or you happen to use only Title Case styles (in which case you will likely never notice any problems) -- I can't opine on that.

[retorquere]

If you're going to keep titles this way, you will probably also want exportTitleCase off. But that will get you structurally wrong results when you export it back to bib(la)tex and render as APA7 (or any other sentence-case style).

[retorquere]

I have an BibLaTeX->Zotero bibliography that I imported in May last year, and all the capitalization in the titles is intact.

You may have done import without BBT -- the stock BibTeX importer does not do sentence-casing, with the result that sentence-case bibliographies that include items imported this way will be styled wrongly. That's an easy way to get a points deduction on a paper as a student.

You can turn off BBT import without fully disabling BBT using a hidden pref: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/installation/preferences/hidden-preferences/index.html#import.

BTW if an item contains a langid field that is not one of

• american
• british
• canadian
• english
• australian
• newzealand
• usenglish
• ukenglish
• en
• eng
• en-au
• en-bz
• en-ca
• en-cb
• en-gb
• en-ie
• en-jm
• en-nz
• en-ph
• en-tt
• en-us
• en-za
• en-zw

BBT will never sentence-case titles on import for those items, regardless of the settings I mentioned above. Title/sentence casing applies to English(ish) language items.