Initialization not working

mdyason

I am using a home grown style which is working fine. However the Author initialization is not working. The relevant style lines are:

<names variable="author" delimiter=" ">
<name and="text" et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" name-as-sort-order="first" sort-separator=" " initialize-with="."/>
</names>

I thought that if the author is "Smith, James" then we would get Smith J. but instead I get Smith James when using the Zotero style preview. This has nothing to do with disambiguation as it makes no difference if this is the only cite in the document (or chosen for the preview)

Can anyone see what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

adamsmith

That bit looks right to me. I'd want to see the whole style (paste to hastebin.com , click on the page with the + sign to create a new bin, share the link here). Could be some inherited property like initialize="false", could be that you're calling a different macro, could be an invalid style that triggers a processor failure.

mdyason

Hi Adam

the style is here; https://hastebin.com/ruxaqaduri.xml

The macro that is not working is called "authors-editors"

I appreciate your time

adamsmith

yeah, you have initialize="false" set for the bibliography and name attributes cascade down unless they're specifically overridden at the lower level.

I think you should be able to just delete it there and it should work but in case it's there for a reason, you'd need to explicitly set initialize="true" in on name in your macro.

edit: you should also make sure your style validates -- you currently are using an undefined macro to sort. see https://validator.citationstyles.org/?url=https://hastebin.com/raw/ruxaqaduri&version=1.0.1#source-code

mdyason

Thanks Adam