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

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

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Dear Ihor and Max,

thanks for the feedback and apologies for responding that late.

On Wed, 15 May 2024 at 13:48, Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is it possible to keep title formatting from .bib files till it becomes
> known that specific style requires sentence case for particular entry
> type? I had a hope that it might alleviate the issue and to make things
> working out of the box for more users.

The problem is that many (maybe most) CSL styles simply assume that
titles are in sentence-case in the input without
making this explicit. The APA citation style is a prominent example:
the APA guidelines require sentence-case titles but
AFAICS the standard CSL implementations do not encode this explicitly.
Of course it could be checked whether
a CSL style contains explicit instructions about how to format titles
and skip  sentence-case conversion of input for those but this
probably would not
solve the problems of users who do not want the conversion at all.

> > I'm a bit unsure about naming the option:
> > Perhaps `org-cite-csl-sentence-case-bibtex-titles-without-langid'
>
> A variant: org-cite-csl-bibtex-title-to-sentence-case

thanks, in the attached patch I went with (a slightly modified version of) this.

> Does it means that you added one more argument to `citeproc-create' and
> that consistent Org and citeproc-el versions must be used?

no, at least in the sense that this argument has been there since 2021.

> It may be tricky to preserve
> backward-forward compatibility on this step, but it should make further
> changes easier. It may be reasonable to explicitly add version of
> "protocol" to the property list, so that citeproc-el may decide if error
> should be signaled in the case of serious version difference.

although I don't think backward compatibility could be a problem in
that particular case, in the future
a mechanism like this  might be useful, so I plan to implement it,
thanks for the suggestion.

> It is not clear for me why `org-cite-csl-sentence-case-bibtex-titles' is
> a part of Org, not of citeproc-el. The only thing that Org can do is to
> pass it to citeproc-el. It is not configurable per .org file and likely
> it should not be. From my point of view it might be more suitable per
> .bib file. Anyway it is almost unrelated to Org.

citeproc-el doesn't have customizable user options by design because
it was conceived as a relatively low level
rendering library. Also, it's used by several user-facing packages by
now in addition to Org (org-ref, citar etc.) so
I think it would be both confusing and difficult to try to keep this
type of customizations in the library.

> On Mon, 17 Jun 2024 at 13:37, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:

> > > Also, it would be nice to point out the CSL and Bibtex have different> > > conventions for the title field.

I added a few words about this now both in the docstring and in the
ORG-NEWS entry -- I've attached
the updated patch.

best wishes,
András

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From e89c7872d8c287fb3affd9c815a1423b366c2bb9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Andras Simonyi <andras.simonyi@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:26:19 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] oc-csl: New custom option
 `org-cite-csl-bibtex-titles-to-sentence-case'

* lisp/oc-csl.el (org-cite-csl-bibtex-titles-to-sentence-case): New
variable.
(org-cite-csl--processor): Create the itemgetter using the new option.
* etc/ORG-NEWS (New option
~org-cite-csl-bibtex-titles-to-sentence-case~): Announce the change.
---
 etc/ORG-NEWS   | 11 +++++++++++
 lisp/oc-csl.el | 21 ++++++++++++++++++++-
 2 files changed, 31 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/etc/ORG-NEWS b/etc/ORG-NEWS
index b81dabb15..78a60382d 100644
--- a/etc/ORG-NEWS
+++ b/etc/ORG-NEWS
@@ -61,6 +61,17 @@ The default value used to be pulled from =dvipng= process type from
 =latexmk= (when available), or running =latex= multiple times, so that
 all the references are resolved in the generated png.
 
+*** New option ~org-cite-csl-bibtex-titles-to-sentence-case~
+
+When this option is non-nil then title fields in bibtex bibliography
+entries are converted to sentence-case before being formatted
+according to a CSL style, except for entries with a =langid= field
+specifying a non-English language.  When nil, this conversion is
+limited to entries having a =langid= field specifying a variant of
+English.  The default value is ~t~ as the CSL standard assumes that
+English titles are specified in sentence-case but the bibtex
+bibliography format requires them to be written in title-case.
+
 ** New functions and changes in function arguments
 
 # This also includes changes in function behavior from Elisp perspective.
diff --git a/lisp/oc-csl.el b/lisp/oc-csl.el
index b8691bf6f..338f72e9d 100644
--- a/lisp/oc-csl.el
+++ b/lisp/oc-csl.el
@@ -321,6 +321,24 @@ in the bibliography measured in characters."
   :type 'string
   :package-version '(Org . "9.7"))
 
+(defcustom org-cite-csl-bibtex-titles-to-sentence-case t
+  "Convert bibtex title fields to sentence-case by default.
+
+When non-nil, title fields in bibtex bibliography entries are
+converted to sentence-case before being formatted according to a
+CSL style, except for entries with a `langid' field specifying a
+non-English language.  When nil, title conversion is limited to
+entries having a `langid' field specifying a variant of English.
+
+Conversion of titles to sentence-case by default is in most cases
+useful because the CSL standard assumes that English titles are
+specified in sentence-case but the bibtex bibliography format
+requires them to be written in title-case."
+  :group 'org-cite
+  :package-version '(Org . "9.8")
+  :type 'boolean
+  :safe #'booleanp)
+
 \f
 ;;; Internal variables
 (defconst org-cite-csl--etc-dir
@@ -579,7 +597,8 @@ property in INFO."
              (processor
               (citeproc-create
                (org-cite-csl--style-file info)
-               (citeproc-hash-itemgetter-from-any bibliography)
+               (citeproc-hash-itemgetter-from-any
+                bibliography (not org-cite-csl-bibtex-titles-to-sentence-case))
                (org-cite-csl--locale-getter)
                locale)))
         (plist-put info :cite-citeproc-processor processor)
-- 
2.34.1