More on Author Name Case and Order

DWL-SDCA
It seems that the level of interest in incorporating mechanisms to toggle the order of author names and to change all caps to sentence case is low (or at least lower than my own interest level). With the name order, at least, this cannot be accomplished on import because the online database does not maintain name order consistency.

I am willing to pay for the development of a plug-in that would accomplish these manipulations. My email address is available by clicking my username.
  • dstillman
    Doesn't need to be a plugin. We'll happily accept a patch that allows those things via right-click on a name.
  • DWL-SDCA
    That is good news. Now, I await interested programmers.
  • DWL-SDCA
    One more try. Is anyone interested?
  • fbennett
    If no one picks this up, I'll probably give it a try sometime soon. I'm working with an unsighted friend over accessibility, and one of the first things we've encountered is a need for hot-key switching between the three columns of the Zotero display. To solve that I'll need to wade into the UI code anyway, and this could be slotted in in the process.
  • fbennett
    edited May 19, 2012
    Another thing I'd like to have is hot-key support for pushing individual characters from family to given name and vice-versa. Names in Chinese glyphs are often provided as a single unit with no delimiter, and it's a headache to split them up with cut and paste.
  • fbennett
    Okay, I've added a name-swapping feature to the multilingual variant (MLZ), in the left-click menu from the creator label. The UI code for MLZ differs somewhat from that of official Zotero, and the patch will not apply cleanly, but it could be adapted (by someone) without enormous effort.
  • dstillman
    I'm working with an unsighted friend over accessibility, and one of the first things we've encountered is a need for hot-key switching between the three columns of the Zotero display.
    Off-topic, but you can already tab between the panes. There's also a shortcut to focus the libraries pane. Keyboard navigation can definitely be improved, though—feel free to start a new thread with specifics.
  • fbennett
    I've adapted the patch and posted it as a tracker issue here. It's implemented as left-click from label, rather than right-click on name. It could be re-jigged to run from the other context, the code for the switch would not change.

    Dan: thanks, I see the shortcut now. I'll post more once I've started to find my way around.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Is there further progress on getting this into 3.5?
  • fbennett
    Gracile recently refreshed the proposal as a proper pull request. Other than that I don't know what the status is.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Here is another example of how useful "toggle-names" would be.

    Please see this from ScienceDirect:

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705811048363

    The presented name order differs by article within this journal issue.
  • fbennett
    edited January 18, 2013
    MLZ currently cites properly registered names in the order implicitly appropriate to the script in which they are written. There was formerly a toggle to preserve the order of the name when it is transliterated, which I will be restoring at some point. This would yield the behaviour shown under the link, but relies on support for field variants, and requires inclusion of the the author's name, in the record, in its original script -- which is good practice, but may not be practicable in all cases. An alternative or supplementary approach would be to allow name orders to be controlled by the locale set on the name field (which MLZ permits). Would this address the requirement, or are there other approaches that should be considered?
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited January 18, 2013
    My problem is that there is no pattern to the name order inthe metadata from some journals. In my example above, some articles from the journal issue have transliterated names in the proper order and some articles have names reversed. Sometimes author name order in the same aritcle aren't consistent. The same for regular non-transliterated names.

    I don't see how this can be automated. For example, take the name in metadata, John, Smith -- that is John as the last name. I had a childhood friend who had the first name "Smith" and his family name "John". I can see how a journal could misinterpret his name. (His brother, named John John had great success in local politics.) There is no way for software to "know" the correct name order. Human intervention is needed by someone who knows the correct full name.
  • fbennett
    Ah, right. My post above is about issues on the output side. If the input is messed up, manual intervention can't be avoided as you say.
  • adamsmith
    In case people missed this - this was implemented in Zotero 4.0: Right-click on author name: "Swap firstname/lastname"
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