name-part formatting and (short) titles

CSL Development
1

Hi,

I think there is an error in the test:
decorations_AndTermUnaffectedByNameDecorations.txt:

According to the specification:
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#name-part-formatting

"When set to “family”, the formatting [of name-part elements] acts on
the “family”, “dropping-particle” and “non-dropping-particle"
name-parts (the “suffix” name-part is not subject to any name-part
formatting).”

So while “van” must be in small-caps, ‘III’ should not. Am I right?

A question about titles: bibutils has an option for not splitting
titles. That means that the title, by default, is split into a 'title’
and a ‘short-title’ variable whenever a punctuation occurs (the
problem with bibutils is that the punctuation is lost, so I’m using
the option to suppress this behavior).

I’ve also seen that such a rule is applied in the test-suite (under
the ‘form’ group).

Since I didn’t know the rule before, where does the split happen (only
with ‘:.?!’ I suppose)?

A third question about “title” capitalization (headline style): did
you set some specific rule? If not I think I’m going to follow the
ones you may read here:

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/sp7084/ch4.html
(4.3. Headline Style Capitalization)

Andrea

2

Hi,

I think there is an error in the test:
decorations_AndTermUnaffectedByNameDecorations.txt:

According to the specification:
Redirecting…

“When set to “family”, the formatting [of name-part elements] acts on
the “family”, “dropping-particle” and “non-dropping-particle”
name-parts (the “suffix” name-part is not subject to any name-part
formatting).”

So while “van” must be in small-caps, ‘III’ should not. Am I right?

Well spotted. This test was indeed wrong.

A question about titles: bibutils has an option for not splitting
titles. That means that the title, by default, is split into a ‘title’
and a ‘short-title’ variable whenever a punctuation occurs (the
problem with bibutils is that the punctuation is lost, so I’m using
the option to suppress this behavior).

I’ve also seen that such a rule is applied in the test-suite (under
the ‘form’ group).

Since I didn’t know the rule before, where does the split happen (only
with ‘:.?!’ I suppose)?

The processor is just pulling the title from the shortTitle input
variable in those fixtures, there’s no splitting magic.

Separately from this issue, there has been discussion of automatically
splittlng titles, to obtain main- and sub-title segments. Separate
formatting of the two is often required in German styles, apparently.
Supporting separate formatting of main-title and sub-title would
require extensions to CSL, and the splitting logic is hard to make
robust enough for production use, so the use case isn’t covered
currently.

A third question about “title” capitalization (headline style): did
you set some specific rule? If not I think I’m going to follow the
ones you may read here:

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/sp7084/ch4.html
(4.3. Headline Style Capitalization)

I just adapted code that I found in Zotero for this, which seems to
have kept most people happy most of the time. If your algorithm kicks
up differences against the tests, we can talk it over; they’re not
carved in stone.