Way to force capitalization of proper nouns in sentence case

[Jon]

I can imagine that there may be uncommon situations for a subset of users where you'd have to change modify the title for different journals/styles, but I think the comma trick will take care the vast majority of situations. I really don't want to create a markup language like LaTeX for Bookends.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Massachusetts user]

Well I don't know anything about the internals of Bookends, but is there really a dangerous slippery slope from allowing a character to be marked somehow as a "hard uppercase" to building in an entire markup language? We can already add an italic or boldface attribute to words inside a title. Could a hard upper/lowercase be added to the program (perhaps showing up on-screen as a color) as just another attribute of thje same sort?

[Jon]

I didn't mean what you were asking for is as difficult as implementing LaTeX formatting (obviously it is not), I meant I don't want to add markup at all (we already have that for super and subscript, I'm afraid, but that can't be helped). And what you're asking for couldn't be taken care of in the format, it would have to be on a word-by-word basis in the reference itself, if I understand your request. If I misunderstand, you need to supply concrete examples of what you want and why Bookends can't handle it now.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Massachusetts user]

Just to pick an extreme example from papers in linguistics, here are two references to papers, formatted as required by one of the major journals. The key point is that "PRO" and "pro" are actually very different things:

Kayne, Richard S. 1991. Romance clitics, verb movement, and PRO. Linguistic Inquiry. 22:647-686. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178745]
Manzini, M. Rita, and Leonardo M. Savoia. 1997. Null subjects without pro. In Backley Philip, and John Harris, eds. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9. London: University College London.

The field also uses the capital letter "A" as a technical term, obviously distinct from the indefinite article "a", and there are lots of similar examples. We can't add "A" or "PRO" to the general capitalizations lists, of course, or else we lose "a" and "pro". Now I guess the new comma at the end of the title can keep these straight, but then the problem is that for some publications (for example, Oxford University Press volumes), the format should look like this -- i.e. with title case:

Kayne, Richard S. (1991). 'Romance Clitics, Verb Movement, and PRO', Linguistic Inquiry 22, 647-686.
Manzini, M. Rita and Leonardo M. Savoia (1997). 'Null Subjects without pro', in Backley Philip and John Harris (eds.), UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9. London: University College London.

I find this kind of issue arising often, actually. I work around it, but it would be very useful to have a straightforward way of hard-coding capitalization in the individual words of a reference.

[Jon]

So it is markup you are asking for, like LaTeX (where curly brackets inside of the title would mean leave case alone on an individual word basis):

Romance clitics, verb movement, and {PRO}

And then we'd need a way to escape real curly brackets someone might want to use, like

Use of the subset \{1-3\}

This isn't something I'm keen to do, even though I can see that there might be some occasions where it would be useful. I don't like the idea of adding more complexity to formatting, and a capability that I believe the vast majority of people won't use (and there are workarounds, perhaps a bit annoying, as you note). If others would find this really useful enough that it would justify the added complexity, please post here.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Massachusetts user]

I would be happiest with a prettier on-screen presentation of this, like whatever the program does with italics etc. So that, for example we could see something like this:

Romance clitics, verb movement, and PRO.

Where the blue text would internally have the same effect as the mark-up you have in mind.


(Side note, I didn't intend to enter this discussion -- but I was too tempted. I actually came to this forum with a very mundane question that I'm hoping you could answer in a microsecond. It's the one I asked right before posting on this topic. Thanks.)

[nicka]

Here's one that I think can't be fixed with a comma at the end: Epstein, S. D. (1984). Quantifier-pro and the LF Representation of PROarb. Linguistic Inquiry, 15(3), 499–505.

I admit there aren't many papers with PRO and pro in the title, but this kind of thing can happen.

[Massachusetts user]

Well no, the comma will work fine for pro vs. PRO, even in the same title. But it will also freeze the capitalization of the word "Representation" as either upper-case or lower-case at the beginning. That's the trade-off with the comma system. One journal/publisher may want "representation" because they don't use title case in their references section, while another wants "Representation" because they do.

That's the kind of thing that's usually managed -- and managed well -- by Bookends. But the comma system forces one or another choice, and then it has to be changed manually to the other choice.