On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Frank Bennett <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 6:00 AM, Gregory Jordan <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Sorry for the potential thread break — I'm a new member to the list so I
>> can't reply to this thread in a nice way...
>>
>> My apologies in advance if this idea has previously been proposed and
>> decided against. I've only kept up with the list for a short while now.
>>
>> I'm a developer for Paperpile, a new(ish) reference manager making use of
>> CSL and citeproc-js.
>>
>> Personally, I'd love to see CSL move toward widespread support for the
>> solution that Bibtex has used for years, which is to allow users to surround
>> words with braces to protect the capitalization as-is. This would go very
>> far towards giving a user the power to force de-capitalization (or
>> capitalization) of things that they know should be a certain way in their
>> bibliography, despite the CSL style and/or the processor's best attempts to
>> do the right thing.
>>
>> It seems clear that no matter how smart one is about trying to title-case,
>> there will always be edge cases where a single item is improperly
>> capitalized. Without any user-facing way to protect these edge cases, we're
>> stuck either (a) avoiding title case like the plague in CSL styles and just
>> using strings as-is from the input, or (b) embracing title case in the
>> styles and dealing with frustrated users who can't tweak things the way they
>> want.
>>
>> Some benefits to a bibtex-like syntax for protecting capitalization would
>> be:
>>  - It's immediately familiar to anyone who's ever used bibtex.
>>  - It's directly interoperable with existing bibtex data.
>>  - It's simple enough for many users to learn and remember. (I don't think
>> an HTML syntax would ever have this benefit.)
>>  - It easily generalizes to all variable outputs, not just titles.
>>
>> (For context, we recently had a user contact us about incorrect
>> capitalization of journal names in APA style:
>> https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/issues/759 which brought
>> this issue to our attention.)
>>
>> I think any type of HTML-based syntax would be misdirected toward
>> capitalization, since the issues of formatting (e.g. italics, superscript)
>> and capitalization are not one and the same. Formatting is specific to only
>> non-plain-text outputs, while capitalization is relevant no matter how a
>> citation is ultimately being displayed.
>>
>> All that said, maybe there's some obvious problem with this approach, or
>> maybe it's something that should be left up to each processor to decided.
>> However, I have a feeling it would be best in the long term to have
>> something clearly spelled out in a processor-agnostic document to both
>> improve clarity and aid widespread adoption.
>>
>> If there's interest, we'd be happy to help implement this in citeproc-js.
>>
>> greg
>
> Some processor-specific syntax for this currently coded into citeproc-js:
>
>    <span class="nocase">qwerty</span>
>
> The "nocase" form has the effect of squiggly braces in BibTeX (as I
> understand it): it prevents changes to the case of the enclosed text
> when title case or text case are applied to the field. The idea was

(Oops, sorry, typo: I should have written "when title case or sentence
case are applied to the field".)

> (and I guess I would say is) to use a markup syntax that can be easily
> represented in a UI without additional levels of external parsing by
> the client. As far as I know the syntax isn't supported in the UI of
> any clients out there, though, and it hasn't seen much use for the
> obvious-enough reason that it's quite an awkward thing to type, and
> distracting when displayed verbatim.
>
> It should be a simple thing to add a spec line to the parser that
> applies the same methods to squiggly-brace-enclosed text. Backslash
> escaping should just work, without additional coding.
>
> in citeproc-js, mixing "plain text" and "html" approaches isn't
> particularly a problem, but smooth operation with other tools might
> require greater consistency. It would be good to have input from other
> processor developers and consumers of CSL; and in the interest of data
> exchange, it would be good to have a description of preferred markup
> set in an adjunct to the CSL specification before making further
> changes.
>
>
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 4:13pm, Aurimas Vinckevicius wrote:
>>
>>>Clearly, string formatting (mostly in titles) is necessary and is getting
>>>implemented whether CSL specifies it or not. IMO HTML (or XML, which would
>>>probably be more work for everyone) is the most elegant and broadly
>>> supported
>>>approach.
>>
>>>If CSL really wants to remain format-agnostic in this regard, then it could
>>> just
>>>specify that substrings can be marked (with possible nesting) for various
>>>formatting (italics, superscript, forced title-casing, etc.) and leave the
>>> language
>>>of the formatting up to the citeproc developers. CSL can then go on to
>>> specify
>>>how such substrings are handled when producing citations.
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Bruce D'Arcus <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I haven't looked at this issue, but putting html in json files feels
>>> really wrong as a general proposition.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Rintze Zelle <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>> > So far the CSL spec is rather format-agnostic when it comes to input.
>>> > It's
>>> > one of the reasons why citeproc-js's support for inline rich text
>>> > formatting
>>> > of titles (http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/rich_text_bibliography)
>>> > isn't
>>> > included in the spec.
>>> >
>>> > I see the use of what you're proposing, but it is rather HTML-oriented.
>>> > Are
>>> > we comfortable including something like this in the spec, or would it be
>>> > better to have a separate (sub)document that focuses on CSL input (which
>>> > could also be used to describe the CSL JSON data model)?
>>> >
>>> > Rintze
>>
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