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Changing case in bibliography titles

Open Jellby opened this issue 8 years ago • 4 comments

I need to write article titles in the bibliography, but change the case, and I can't find how to do it (if it's possible). As per the Chem. Rev. instructions: "All titles in references should have the same format - Title Case (preferred) or non-title case; mixed references formatting is not allowed".

Jellby avatar Jan 15 '18 10:01 Jellby

This is a tricky one: I've stayed away from case changing quite deliberately. The issue with 'title casing' is that there are value judgements (what counts as a 'significant' word), whilst for lower casing one runs into the risk of unprotected important capitals. So I've left this alone to date.

I know the ACS are asking for titles in all submissions now, so perhaps I'll need to revisit it. Certainly a flag 'force lower casing' is a possible.

josephwright avatar Jan 15 '18 14:01 josephwright

Of course, I wasn't thinking of changing to title case. Since they ask for consistent casing I thought I'd change everything to lowercase as the standard styles (or is it only with makebst?) do, but found out that's not an option with achemso. in my bib files I try to keep protected capitals when they matter, anyway.

Personally, i think this kind of stylistic nitpicking should be done by the editor, not by the author...

Jellby avatar Jan 15 '18 15:01 Jellby

@Jellby Yes, totally agree on this not really being the author's job: but also see the need to deal with awkward editorial workflows!

josephwright avatar Jan 15 '18 15:01 josephwright

There's a nice solution on TeXExchange that addresses this with the titlecaps package.

To get it to work as expected using the modified .bst and the demo documents, I made a few changes to the demo. I just added the following after the document declaration:

\usepackage{titlecaps}
\Addlcwords{is with of in the an from a iv v}

The numerals are included in the \Addlcwords call here because titlecaps parses anything inside parentheses with the first letter normally capitalized. For me, it skips the first character of the \textsc call (even with \textnc{\textsc{(IV)}}, but I'm likely misunderstanding the escape.

emleddin avatar Apr 21 '22 17:04 emleddin