Sonny Software

Hello,

I've been working with Bookends for some months now and am generally very happy, but I have a problem with capitalisation that I don't think Bookends offers a workaround for: I work with a custom citation format and have set capitalisation to Title case. Leave 'as is' is not particularly useful as references imported from library catalogues etc are usually not capitalised the way I want them to be. Title case works fine for references in English.

However, approximately 20% of the references I work with are in German. I usually enter those manually, and for those, capitalisation should remain 'as is', because in German, nouns are usually capitalised while adjectives, articles, prepositions etc are not, so title case would be incorrect.

Using the list where individual words can be excluded from capitalisation is not a practicable solution for this, as I can hardly enter all adjectives, prepositions etc. of the German language there and even doing it for all relevant words in 100s of references would be a pain.

The only other workarounds I can think of are (1) manually altering the 80% of my references that are in English upon import so that their capitalisation is in title case in my library, and set capitalisation to 'as is' for everything. The editing would once again be quite laborious and it obviously means that if I, at some point, publish an article in a journal that requires sentence-style capitalisation, I'd have to change it back manually once again.

(2) The other way of dealing with it that I've come up with would be to create reference types for the German references ('German book' 'German article' etc) and set capitalisation for those reference types to 'as is', and to title case for all other reference types. If no other solution is possible, I'll have to do that, but I fear I'll run out of unused reference types as I'm doing interdisciplinary research in the humanities and have a reasonably wide variety of reference types I use. Also I wonder whether it could have negative effects that I can't think of as yet to have some journal articles as reference type 'journal article' and some as 'German journal article' - at the very least, it would make it difficult to output a bibliography sorted into reference types... ? Also, some fields in some reference types have special functions that would presumably not work in these alternate 'German' versions of the reference types?

So, wouldn't it be possible to add the option to tick a box for an individual reference somewhere or insert a symbol in the temporary citation that means the capitalisation settings ignore that particular reference and leave the capitalisation of that reference as it is in the library?

Thank you for considering this.

Georgia

It's actually quite simple. End the title with a comma and Bookends will output it as is:

Don't change the case of this title,

Jon
Sonny Software

P.S. The comma can also be used to the same effect after an institutional name as author, and after a date that you don't want truncated to just the year.

Oh, that would obviously be much simpler than I thought. So you mean in the library itself?

Edit: ok, just tried, works a charm. Thank you. I've been trying to sort this for weeks, can't believe it was so easy.

Yes, for references whose title you want left as is.

Jon
Sonny Software

Brilliant and thanks, just one follow-up question on the list in preferences that says not to change the case of certain words. If I enter IT the abbreviation on that list, it completely capitalises it the pronoun in titles rather than just leaving the capitalisation of the abbreviation alone. Is that expected behaviour, or have I possibly screwed up my file? I messed with that list quite a bit trying to resolve my language problem.

I'd have to go back and look at the code (it was written many years ago), but I think it enforces the capitalization in the do-not-change list, regardless of how it appears in the title. This is so that sources that output in all caps (e.g. UNITED STATES) are converted to whatever you think is appropriate (United States).

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks again. Thankfully, that one is easy to work around with the comma, it just seemed odd to me that a 'leave alone'-list in fact enforces a change.

Think of it as "don't change -- always output like this".

Jon
Sonny Software