Secondary Sort problem where creator is "De x" or "Van y"

JonEP

The secondary sort feature is great, but I think I found a glitch. When I have the center panel sorted by creator, and set the secondary sort to date, ("Secondary Sort (Creator) --> Date") then all entries where the creator has a compound last name (like De Koninck, De Groot, De , or van Klinken, van Dooren, Van Esterik, etc) sort by the initial word of the compound last name, and then by date.

So,

Van Liere 1980
Van Cott 1994
Van Esterik 1996
Van Cott 2000
Van Esterik 2002
Van Schendel 2005
Van Etten 2006

JonEP

Actually, now that I look at it, when I set secondary sort order to something else, like title, I am still having problems with sorting in the central pane.
Authors are not sorting properly overall.

For instance,
Davis, Kingsley
Davis, Mike
Davis, Erik
Davis, Susan
Davis, Erik

In the case presented here, all the Creator last names Davis are treated as the same Creator, and then the titles of all authors named Davis have been sorted alphabetically.

Is there a way to sort by Creators (lastname, firstname), followed by whatever the secondary sort is?

Thanks - sorry if I'm missing something here.

JonEP

Here are two links to images of the center panel, illustrating the problem when the initial sort is "creator" and the secondary sort is "year". In the first case, the different authors whose last names begin with "De " are all sorted simply by "De". In the second case, all creators with last name Smith are sorted as if they were one author.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jzi1sdhzhz9q4xw/ZoteroSortIssue.jpg

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nq15xt5e0crl8wl/ZoteroSortIssue2.jpg

dstillman

You're using the extensions.zotero.sortCreatorAsString pref, which sorts by the first word in the Creator string. If you want creator sorting based on full names, you'd have to switch that to the default 'false' in about:config.

While that's the only thing that would help with the Smith issue — since the whole point of that pref is that it just uses the Creator string — it could probably be made to sort the "de" entries correctly with the pref enabled. It uses just the first word now because that's what it does anyway before falling back to full creator sorting when the pref is off. It probably makes more sense to use everything before any localized "and" or "et al" when the pref is disabled, and to simply use the whole string when the pref is enabled.

JonEP

Thanks that totally fixed it. I wonder how that got set? I don't remember setting it. Anyway, all entries, "smith" and "de" are working properly now.

dstillman

You set it when secondary sorting was first implemented:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8057/2/sorting-in-the-library-window/#Item_18

(I think you thought the pref was necessary to enable secondary sorting. It's actually for something totally different.)

dstillman

OK, fixed this in the latest 4.0 Beta. sortCreatorByString will now use the whole string, and the normal mode will use the string up through ' and ' or 'et al.' before falling back to the full creator, which might speed things up slightly in libraries with lots of names with particles.