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

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 11/05/2024 22:33, András Simonyi wrote:
> since bibtex and biblatex requires title fields to be in title case
> but CSL assumes that they are in sentence-case, citeproc-el converts
> title fields in bib(la)tex bibliography databases into sentence-case
> before processing them except for entries with an explicit non-English
> langid value.

I am not a user of citeproc-el, so feel free to disregard my comments.

In the past I had to adjust BibTeX styles, but yesterday I was surprised 
that there are options for upper case, lower case, and sentence-style 
capitalization, but not for title-style capitalization. It seems that 
both approaches with title case and with sentence case have some 
shortcomings. Likely title case like in BibTeX requires more explicit 
hints and perhaps there are cases when available hints are not enough to 
get specific formatting. I still expect that CSL needs hints as well to 
avoid improper formatting.

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.

> 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

> @@ -584,7 +599,8 @@ 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-sentence-case-bibtex-titles))
>                 (org-cite-csl--locale-getter)
>                 locale)))
>          (plist-put info :cite-citeproc-processor processor)

I am not in the context, so I may be completely wrong.

Does it means that you added one more argument to `citeproc-create' and 
that consistent Org and citeproc-el versions must be used? If so, 
wouldn't it better to pass a property list to allow newer Org to work 
with older citeproc-el or vice versa? 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.

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.