Re: citestyle's BIBLIOSEQUENCE sorts upper and lower alpha separately

Hi Jeremy,

Quoting Jeremy Malcolm <[email protected]>:

> It there any way for RefDB not to sort bibliography entries in this way?
>
> Zippay, A ...
> Zittrain, Jonathan ...
> Zumbansen, P ...
> de Montesquieu, Charles ...
> de la Chapelle, Bertrand ...
> van Dijk, Jan ...
> von Hippel, Eric ...
>

There is no such way out of the box, but I see that we need one. Would  
you be kind enough to create a feature request on SourceForge?

I see two solutions to this problem. The more limited approach is to  
make the ORDER BY case-insensitive (SQLite and newer versions of MySQL  
allow this via collations; PostgreSQL apparently requires uppercasing  
or something). I guess this could be part of the next prerelease,  
unless I miss some basic problem with this approach.

However, this is may be insufficient to solve sorting problems with  
special characters like umlauts or accented characters, as these are  
often sorted outside a-z. Therefore, some bibliographic data formats  
like MODS carry extra fields that describe where a name or a title  
should appear in a sorted list. Just like titles are often sorted by  
the first non-article word instead of just lexically (ain't no fun to  
scan through half a million titles starting with "The"), the compound  
name "van Dijk" in your example can appear either close to  
"Dijkstra,A." or close to "Vandijk,A.". I'm sure this distinction  
depends on the bibliography style as well. In any case, we'd have to  
add a field that records a normalized name string (case insensitive,  
with umlauts and accents replaced in an intelligent fashion) to  
provide a real solution to the sorting problem.

regards,
Markus


-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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