Re: [PATCH] oc-csl: New custom option `org-cite-csl-sentence-case-bibtex-titles'

["András Simonyi" <andras.simonyi@gmail.com>]

Dear All,

On Sat, 11 May 2024 at 19:24, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:

>> > since bibtex and biblatex requires title fields to be in title case
> Are you sure? AFAIK, bibtex and biblatex (depending on the bibstyle)
> does not care about capitalization and instead applies its own, unless
> the title explicitly protects the capitalization/case with {Curly
> BracketS}.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that the expected casing in .bib bibliography
databases for the title fields is by default title case, plus
protective braces around texts whose case shouldn't be touched during
formatting (of course, formatting itself can produce both sentence and
title case from this input depending on the used style). This
requirement was already clearly stated in Lamport's original LaTeX
book. To quote the relevant part of "The Bibliography Database"
chapter  (2nd edition, p. 158):

> The bibliography style determines whether or not a title is capitalized; the
> titles of books usually are, the titles of articles usually are not. You type
> a title the way it should appear if it is capitalized. You should capitalize
> the first word of the title, the first word after a colon, and all other words
> except articles and unstressed conjunctions and prepositions. BiBTeX will
> change uppercase letters to lowercase if appropriate. Uppercase letters that
> should not be changed are enclosed in braces.

These requirements haven't changed since then and also hold for
biblatex, see, e.g.,
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/439440/what-is-the-proper-casing-to-use-when-storing-titles-in-the-bibliography-database.
If you are interested, you can also look at the discussion concerning
the citeproc-el conversion implementation at
https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-el/issues/71, see also the
"Capitalization in titles" section in
Pandoc's User’s Guide.

The proposed default makes it possible to use a .bib bibliography
database that conforms to the standard title field format requirements
(title case etc.) and get the intended output corresponding to the
used citation style both with bib(la)tex and CSL styles.  Moreover, it
matches Pandoc's behaviour, see
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/269.

best wishes,
András