Problem with "a.k.a." abbreviation in citeproc titles

CSL Development
1

I’m not sure if the problem is my data, citeproc, or the CSL. The problem is the awkward casing of “A.k.a.” when --style-csl chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl:

Paul Buchheit, “Applied Philosophy, A.k.a. ‘Hacking’,” Web log message, (October 13, 2009), http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/10/applied-philosophy-aka-hacking.html.↩

My data:—

Should I be somehow escaping punctuated initialisms?

2

Pandoc follows the CSL docs:

"Title case conversion (with text-case set to “title”) for English-language
items is performed by:

For uppercase strings, the first character of each word remains capitalized.
All other letters are lowercased.
For lower or mixed case strings, the first character of each lowercase word
is capitalized. The case of words in mixed or uppercase stays the same.
In both cases, stop words are lowercased, unless they are the first or last
word in the string, or follow a colon. The stop words are “a”, “an”, “and”,
“as”, “at”, “but”, “by”, “down”, “for”, “from”, “in”, “into”, “nor”, “of”,
“on”, “onto”, “or”, “over”, “so”, “the”, “till”, “to”, “up”, “via”, “with”,
and “yet”.

As far as I can see, this says that “a.k.a.” should be
capitalized (even though obviously that’s not a good
outcome).

It seems to me that a good rule would be that any word
containing an internal period should have its case left
alone, but it would be good to get feedback from the
CSL/Zotero side.

+++ Joseph Reagle [Oct 12 17 10:00 ]:>I’m not sure if the problem is my data, citeproc, or the CSL. The problem is the awkward casing of “A.k.a.” when --style-csl chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl:

3

John’s interpretation of the specification looks clearly correct to me,
i.e. pandoc-citeproc is behaving according to the specification.
citeproc-js (i.e. Zotero, Mendeley, etc.) actually keeps a.k.a in
lowercase, though, when title casing, i.e. goes beyond/against (depending
on your view) the spec here – it’d be great if Frank could point to the
exact test or rule he uses and we could consider that for the next
iteration of the specifications. It may just be what John suggests, but I’d
want to see if it captures additional conditions/cases.

(Joseph – you’re aware of the a.k.a. wrapper
you can use to disable title-casing? I’m pretty sure that works in pandoc)

4

(note that my message won’t get posted to the pandoc group, I believe, so
please forward that if needed)

5

Thanks, I’ll do that.