Why does pandoc citeproc title-case lowercase usernames in notes (but not, correctly, in bibliography)

[reagle]

I'm having a problem using pandoc citeproc and the new chicago-notes-bibliography-17th-edition.csl. The notes have the first character of the author's name capitalized. Note, this is not the case in the bibliography. I don't see any statement such as <text variable="author" text-case="capitalize-first"/> in the CSL so why is this happening and how to fix? I'm not convinced this is a CSL issue, which is why I am posting here. Note that the name brtw is not title cased if there is a number at its end.

Output

❯ pandoc test-usernames.md --citeproc --csl=chicago-notes-bibliography-17th-edition.csl.txt --to plain

Testing Username Capitalization

Testing methods to prevent username capitalization in bibliography.

1. Citation 1:[1]
2. Citation 2:[2]
3. Citation 3:[3]
4. Citation 4:[4]
5. Citation 5:[5]
6. Citation 6:[6]
7. Citation 7:[7]
8. Citation 8:[8]
9. Citation 9:[9]

References

{brtw}. “Test 1: Family Name with Curly Braces.” In Reddit. 2001.
{brtw}. “Test 3: Curly Braces.” In Reddit. 2003.
@brtw. “Test 7: Starting with Punctuation.” In Reddit. 2007.
brtw. “Test 2: Plain Literal.” In Reddit. 2002.
———. “Test 4: Nocase Span.” In Reddit. 2004.
​brtw. “Test 5: Zero-Width Space.” In Reddit. 2005.
brtw. “Test 6: Non-Breaking Space.” In Reddit. 2006.
brtw. “Test 8: Family Name with Nocase.” In Reddit. 2008.
brtw56. “Test 9: Username+number, Works!” In Reddit. 2009.

Notes

[1] {Brtw}, “Test 1: Family Name with Curly Braces,” in Reddit, 2001.
[2] Brtw, “Test 2: Plain Literal,” in Reddit, 2002.
[3] {Brtw}, “Test 3: Curly Braces,” in Reddit, 2003.
[4] Brtw, “Test 4: Nocase Span,” in Reddit, 2004.
[5] ​Brtw, “Test 5: Zero-Width Space,” in Reddit, 2005.
[6] Brtw, “Test 6: Non-Breaking Space,” in Reddit, 2006.
[7] @Brtw, “Test 7: Starting with Punctuation,” in Reddit, 2007.
[8] Brtw, “Test 8: Family Name with Nocase,” in Reddit, 2008.
[9] brtw56, “Test 9: Username+number, Works!” in Reddit, 2009.

chicago-notes-bibliography-17th-edition.csl.txt
test-usernames.md

[reagle]

Is this the culprit code in citeproc? (I don't know haskell, but that logic seems a bit different to what I'm seeing.)

-- | Capitalize first letter.
withCapitalizeFirst :: CaseTransformer
withCapitalizeFirst = CaseTransformer go
 where
  go mblang st chunk
     | isMixedCase chunk = chunk
     | st == Start
       = if T.all isLower chunk
            then capitalizeText mblang chunk
            else chunk
     | otherwise = chunk

What is the point of doing this first letter capitalization for a citation note in any case? Especially if it is specified as literal in the YAML biblio DB? Not only does this mangle lowercase usernames, it would mangle names like "bell hooks".

[jgm]

That only affects titles. For names, pandoc doesn't do anything. If you have the name lowercase in the bibliography, it will still be lowercase. However, there is a special rule governing citations in note styles. If you have a citation like [see also @foo], obviously the note should read 1. See also .... So we capitalize the first letter. It has nothing to do with whether it's an author name.

Relevant code https://github.com/jgm/citeproc/blob/master/src/Citeproc/Eval.hs#L1198-L1204

I may be misunderstanding your issue, though.

[jgm]

To make the filter faster you could limit the matches to the beginnings of Cite elements.

[jgm]

I'm going to fix things so that nocase spans work.

[bpj]

@reagle The reason for `username` causing an error in YAML is that the backtick is a reserved character in YAML you should quote it in single quotes: '`username`'. I don't know if that will solve the original issue but it will solve the YAML parsing issue.

[reagle]

Thanks @bpj, I did see that, and this issue has now been resolved #10983 .