On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:37:51 -0000, Morten Omholt Alver
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> What would be more interesting to explore is a flexible way to format
>> the authors, which is not as complicated as the custom name formatters.
>> Perhaps something along the lines of
> Good point. Let's see if we can define some set of arguments that is
> sufficient to cover most cases. Just thinking aloud:
We discussed a proposal for an Authors formatter off-list. The goal is to
allow for easy formatting of the authors string that covers most use
cases, but is also easy to use. We came up with the following proposal.
The Authors export formatter will take a comma-separated list of options.
The following option/value pairs have been suggested so far
AuthorSort = [FirstLast | LastFirst | LastFirstFirst]
AuthorAbbr = [FullName | LastName | Initials | InitialsNoSpace |
FirstInitial]
AuthorSep = [Comma | And | Colon | Semicolon | Sep=<string>]
AuthorLastSep = [And | Colon | Semicolon | Amp | Oxford |
LastSep=<string>]
AuthorPunc = [FullPunc | NoPunc | NoComma | NoPeriod]
AuthorNumber = [inf | <number>]
EtAlString = [et al. | EtAl=<string>]
where the first option is the default value. It works in a similar way to
CSS shorthand syntax: if an option is unspecified, the default value is
used. The order in which it is defined is (almost) irrelevant. So, for
example, the existing formatter 'AuthorFirstAbbrLastOxfordCommas' could
now be replaced by:
Authors(Initials,Oxford)
or, equivalently:
Authors(Initials,Oxford)
and the format that initially sparked this discussion would be
Authors(LastFirst,InitialsNoSpace,NoPunc)
As mentioned, the order in which the options are specified is irrelevant.
There is one possibility for ambiguity, and that is if you specify both
AuthorSep and AuthorLastSep. In which case, the first applicable value
encountered would be for AuthorSep, and the second for AuthorLastSep.
So, Author(Semicolon) would mean:
AuthorSep = Semicolon
AuthorLastSep = And (default)
On the other hand, Author(And,Semicolon) would mean:
AuthorSep = And
AuthorLastSep = Semicolon
whereas Author(Semicolon,And) would result in
AuthorSep = Semicolon
AuthorLastSep = And
but for example Author(Oxford,And) would result in
AuthorSep = And
AuthorLastSep = Oxford
as there is no ambiguity which value means which.
Hrm, whilst I'm writing this, I don't feel 100% comfortable with it.
Perhaps it should be combined into one option, where AuthorSep and
AuthorLastSep are separated by a space? In which case this:
Author(Initials,Comma Oxford)
would be the equivalent of 'AuthorFirstAbbrLastOxfordCommas'.
Anyway, there are still some niggles to sort out, but what do people think
of the proposal so far? I'm not the implementer, so I can't really comment
what is easy/hard to code, but any ideas should be welcome. A good
proposal for this formatter will allow us to get rid of the numerous
hard-coded formatters.
Best,
Mark
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