Re: [Refdb-users] citestyle's BIBLIOSEQUENCE sorts upper and lower alpha separately

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Hi Jeremy,

Quoting Jeremy Malcolm <Je...@Ma...>:

> 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 =20
you be kind enough to create a feature request on SourceForge?

I see two solutions to this problem. The more limited approach is to =20
make the ORDER BY case-insensitive (SQLite and newer versions of MySQL =20
allow this via collations; PostgreSQL apparently requires uppercasing =20
or something). I guess this could be part of the next prerelease, =20
unless I miss some basic problem with this approach.

However, this is may be insufficient to solve sorting problems with =20
special characters like umlauts or accented characters, as these are =20
often sorted outside a-z. Therefore, some bibliographic data formats =20
like MODS carry extra fields that describe where a name or a title =20
should appear in a sorted list. Just like titles are often sorted by =20
the first non-article word instead of just lexically (ain't no fun to =20
scan through half a million titles starting with "The"), the compound =20
name "van Dijk" in your example can appear either close to =20
"Dijkstra,A." or close to "Vandijk,A.". I'm sure this distinction =20
depends on the bibliography style as well. In any case, we'd have to =20
add a field that records a normalized name string (case insensitive, =20
with umlauts and accents replaced in an intelligent fashion) to =20
provide a real solution to the sorting problem.

regards,
Markus


--=20
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de